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Installing Vista On SATA Drive

H

hampuras

Member
Hi,

Last few months I installed Vista Ultimate on my new Seagate SATA II 500GB drive. The installation went smooth without any problem till today.

Last week, a friend of mine bought a new PC and tried to install XP on it. The PC of cource, run on SATA as well. He met with this problem that he cant seem to install due to problem with finding his hard disk. He asked me and I shared my experience with him, telling him that SATA does not require any special setting on the BIOS, it should autodetect and considering its a new pc it shouldnt be a problem at all.

Later, a friend of his told him that he needed to preload a SATA driver during installation. This baffles me and I did a search on google and now I found out about this SATA requirement that requires the user to load a driver during install so that VISTA/XP will be able to recognize the drive.

My question is, why in my case, I did not have to do this (load the driver)? My PC uses the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe mobo.

Thanks
 
This all depends on what mode the SATA controller is in. If it's in RAID or AHCI, then yes you would definitely need a driver for XP. If it's in standard, legacy or enhanced mode, then the controller is in straight ATA mode, and there is no driver required for XP (unless this is some bizarre SATA controller, but if it's down on board, it's probably integrated into the ICH).
 
RAID/AHCI can work without pre-installation drivers in XP if you're using SP2 or higher. Last March, I did the re-installation of XP (using a SP2 disc) on a dying Dell Dimension 8400 in order to determine the problem and the BIOS had been set to RAID/AHCI instead of the compatibility mode I had to previously use with non-SP2 discs.

You can always use N-Lite to integrate the latest service pack into the XP disc along with any pre-installation drivers that would be required.
 
i have a diskette i use everytime i did an XP install on my PC, they were SATA drivers off the DFI website, without those drivers the OC wouldnt recognize my SATA western Dig HD. and even when it did, it showed as a IDE drive.
 
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