Install OS on sata drive?

[Red Squirrel]

Is this even possible? I never thought of it being a problem but it is. I just built an Athlon 64 computer and decided to go high end and get a sata drive instead, given they're about the same price as IDE anyway. But now it's acting as if there's no drive. the bios reconizes it and all, but then windows setup says it can't find drives. Do I need to do the whole F6 thing? if yes, what a PIA... we have to do that at work for the scsi drives on the poweredge servers. Really annoying. I'm sure not every single OS out there has the F6 feature, so that means I'm screwed if ever I decide to install linux on here. But first I want to confirm that's actually what the problem is, and that it may not be something else.

I don't really know anything about sata drives, so maybe I need to set a jumper on it or something? (no jumpers are curently set, it did not come with any) I also noticed a small connector and a big one, do I need to connect something to the big one?

 

[Red Squirrel]

hmm I've guested it right... this is a near impossible task, probably requiring some hackish workaround like soldering pins or something. Been at it for long, can't figure it out... this is like putting me so behind, it's rediculous. I knew I should of sticked with IDE.

 

[Continuity28]

It depends on your motherboard or SATA add in card.

Windows XP does not have the drivers for most Serial ATA supporting chipsets, as it was released in 2002 I think.

The F6 feature is how you load drivers in order for Windows to recognize your devices before installing Windows. All modern operating systems have this in one form or another.

As far as I know, the only motherboard chipset that doesn't need you to do F6 is the nvidia nForce series. Serial ATA works out of the box on these.

For the rest, look in your motherboard box, you should have a floppy disk that contains the driver you need when you go through F6.

 

[Continuity28]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
hmm I've guested it right... this is a near impossible task, probably requiring some hackish workaround like soldering pins or something. Been at it for long, can't figure it out... this is like putting me so behind, it's rediculous. I knew I should of sticked with IDE.

It's not a Serial ATA issue really, it's more of a new hardware issue. If your hardware is newer than Windows, you'll likely need to load your own driver. The different between hard drives and video cards or anything else, is that you need a hard drive controller driver to even see the hard drive, whereas all video cards have a basic compatibility mode that will let you see Windows with a special driver.

If you had a new IDE add in card, you'd have the exact same issue.

 

[Zirconium]

It is possible. The computer I am using right now has its OS installed on a SATA hard drive (WD Raptor 36GB). For the record, I'm using an NForce-3 based motherboard.