what driver to install

[minofifa]

hi

sorry for the stupidity of this question but i'm having ominous thoughts of reformatting my computer. It needs a reformat but last time i did it, i had to bring it in to a tech shop which cost me 100 bucks.

basically the problem was to do with the drivers for my hard drives. when i reformatted, only my 80 gig main drive showed up, my other 2 120 gig drives did not. after i took it in, they tinkered with it and told me that i had installed the wrong driver from the motherdoard CD. My question is: how do i know which driver to install so i don't screw it up this time? will the driver listed in my hardware devices match that on the motherboard CD?

Also, in my hardware devices, i noticed that there are drivers for my two hard drives, under "hard disks", these drivers are supplied by microsoft apparently. But, there is also a device called "SATA and RAID controllers" and this driver seems completely different. Why are there different drivers? why do i need drivers for both?

oh yeah, i don't think my drives are Raid'ed but i'm not sure and i don't know how to tell.

Obviously i don't know a lot about hardware yet, so if anybody can help me out or point me in the right direction, that would be cool. i don't ahve a lot of time right now to do research on it as finals are nearing. so if you have time, chime in.

Thanks

 

[xsilver]

you will need to provide more info if you want help ... eg. what mobo, using extra controllers? what os?

could also be a bios hdd detect conflict issue

if you're using winxp -- there are few instances where a driver is actually nessessary (driver may provide more performance/stability, but winxp will make it work at least)

 

[Melchior]

First off, you don't need drivers for your hard drives, except in some cases, on the hard drive your installing windows ON.

First go into your BIOS and make sure all of your hard drives are detected and reading the correct size properly. Choose which one you want to install Windows on, and note whether its SATA or IDE. If its SATA, it will be slightly more complicated. I would suggest if they're all the same speed, install windows on your IDE Hardrive. It will save you hassle. If installing windows on the IDE HD, just quick format that specific Hardrive, Partition a portion of it dedicated to Windows, and your good to go. Go through the installation, install your Motherboard CHIPSET drivers, VGA drivers, Ethernet Drivers, SOund Drivers, and update your windows (SP2, etc). Don't worry about your Hardrives until everything is done and working properly.

THen you can go into Disk Management and find the rest of your hardrives and format them accordingly and start to use them.

If you find that ALL of your Hardrives are SATA, you will have to boot using your motherboard CD, and create a Floppy disk with your SATA/RAID drivers on them. There should be an option to do so. After you do that, go ahead and install windows. When it asks you to specify additional SCSI and RAID drivers, hit F6 (I hit repeatadly, just to make sure). Later on in installation, it will ask if you want to install SCSI/RAID drivers again, and specify the Floppy, and then it will read off the floppy and off you go. Keep the floppy in the system until everything's done.

For general computer hardware/building I would suggest this excellent guide by Mechbgon : www.omnicast.net/~tmcfadden/guides/build/index.html

 

[Jiggz]

I guess the first question is, WHY DO YOU NEED TO REFORMAT?. If it's clutter you need to clean you can do that easily with software and probably results are just as good as a reformat. Now if you want to upgrade your OS (C: drive) hdd, then you can just copy the old hdd to the newer one without having to re-install any drivers. Oh by the way, if you think you really need to reformat, and don't know what to re-install later. Just buy a copying or imaging software like Casper XP or Ghost. This will copy your existing hdd to another hdd. And when you get done reformatting the old hdd you can just copy back. But then you are back where you started (since everything, bit by bit was copied) except at least you can say you reformatted your hdd without having to pay for drivers to be re-installed or worse yet going to the tech shop.

 

[minofifa]

wow, thanks for the advice xsilver, jiggz, and melchoir. i really appreciate. so you are saying that all of my hard drives should show up in windows XP once i reformat? that is strange... i wonder why it never worked for me. One question to clear things up.. can hard drives be SATA and RAID, or just one? can they be IDE and SATA, or just one? I'm assuming they are just different systems for controlling hard drives.

on a different note, jiggz, I just assumed a reformat was best. In fact i was under the assumption that one should reformat every six months or so. To be honest, i'm only having one problem on my computer that is unacceptable, if i could fix it, i probably wouldn't reformat.

Basically i have a saphire radeon 9800 SE. Also i have a program called Zoomtext (www.aisquared.com) it enlarges the screen for easier viewing. I know it affects the graphics drivers somehow but i'm not sure how. Anyways, i threw a few emulators on my computer to help a friend with a plug in he's building for another piece of software. After i did that, i have been getting blue screens of death, saying that i have run out of memory and my computer just restarts. I'm not sure what emulator it was that did it though. Can the damage be undone by uninstalling / deleting the emulators?

 

[Ausm]

Originally posted by: xsilver
you will need to provide more info if you want help ... eg. what mobo, using extra controllers? what os?

could also be a bios hdd detect conflict issue

if you're using winxp -- there are few instances where a driver is actually nessessary (driver may provide more performance/stability, but winxp will make it work at least)

Good reply :thumbsup:

Ausm

 

[minofifa]

running windows XP home edition
motherboard: ASUS K8N E deluxe
videocard: saphire radeon 9800 SE

lets say that i have a SATA controller on my computer right now to run my hard drives. After a reinstall do i need the driver for this controller to use my hard drives?