? for SATA newbie

[Greubin]

I'm about to jump into the SATA HD arena. I just ordered a Seagate 7200.10 drive. I'm wondering if there's anyway to clone my current xp install onto the new drive and add SATA drivers? Me thinks not, but thought I'd pose the question. It's probably a good time to do a fresh install anyway.

 

[Lord Evermore]

The SATA ports on your board are integrated into the chipset, so there should be no need to load any particular drivers, as SATA is software compatible with IDE. As long as the ports are currently enabled in your BIOS, Windows will have already detected the hardware and loaded drivers, so it'll only need to detect the new hard drive. You should be able to just clone and go.

 

[lamere]

My experiences have differnt for sure. When ever I try to reinstall windows it tells me there is no boot disk found untill I load SATA drivers from the floppy disk. I got lucky with this new board as it has an emulated PATA option in the BIOS. Any other board i've used always wanted drivers before windows would install

 

[Lord Evermore]

I haven't really had a chance to play with SATA drives and whether the "legacy IDE mode" is always needed or not. I've seen some stories where it was only needed if RAID mode was enabled, some anytime native SATA is enabled.

 

[Zepper]

Welcome to the AT forums.

Make sure you have the latest version of your SATA drivers for your mobo and the latest update for t he SATA part of your BIOS and install the SATA drivers into Win before adding the new drive - if not needed, they won't be used. You will then be ready for any contingency when you clone your current drive over to the new one.

.bh.

 

[Greubin]

Thanks for all the replies. My new drive should be here tomorrow. I'll post my findings once I've cloned my system.