SATA install procedure

[GregMal]

OK...I've done a bit of investigation on my future SATA (single drive) install with Vista.
1) Some say Vista will automatically install the SATA drivers after seeing the drive.
2) Some say to make sure SATA in the BIOS is set to IDE. Vista will auto-install.
3) Some say to set the SATA BIOS to RAID 0 Stripe. Vista will auto-install.
4) Many say that I'll have to install drivers. Otherwise Vista won't install.

What do you say?

BTW, the MB will probably the Biostar NF4UAM2G AMD Nforce4 Ultra MB with Athlon 64 X2 cpu. I already have the WD 320 gig SATA drive. It will be the only HD on the system.

 

[Roguestar]

2, methinks.

 

[Tarrant64]

I'm am 98% sure that you won't need to install ANY drivers for your Vista install(regarding hard drives that is). Just load it up and go. If your motherboard supports SATA, it will automatically detect the drive. When Vista starts the installation it will also detect what you need.

 

[Paperdoc]

Read details in the mobo manual, although I will admit they can confuse at first. I have an ASUS mobo. On it the BIOS does all the work, and it was set by default to good places. But you still should check.

On mine, the BIOS offered the choices of having the SATA II ports work as SATA or RAID configurations. If you choose SATA, then a secondary choice was whether or not to have it make the SATA drives behave like PATA (Parallel ATA, aka IDE) drives. I chose those, and as far as the world outside the BIOS is concerned, my SATA II drives are just IDE drives 3 and 4, and my system boots from IDE3. Win XP does not know any of this subterfuge and it's happy. It automatically assigned C: and D: labels to my two drives, then E: and F: to my DVD burners that actually ARE on IDE ports.

IF you actually want to set up a RAID array you have to tell the BIOS that. But you cannot boot from a RAID array. There are a couple ways around that. One is to have you load from somewhere a RAID driver that allows access to the array. The simpler one is almost the same. You specify which physical drive will be the boot drive. Essentially the BIOS sets up a small partition on that drive to boot from and get the RAID array going, then everything proceeds from there. But all this is ONLY if you choose to run RAID. If you choose plain SATA and PATA emulation, all the complications disappear.