Page 2 - Installing Windows XP: Without Sata Drivers & Without Floppy Drive

hey..if you don't have RAID, try going into your BIOS and simply turning AHCI off on your drive...windows should detect your drive then...you prolly won't have to do anything else at all.

In the BIOS you might see something like this for your SATA controller under a heading like DRIVE CONTROLLER or something like that....

RAID Autodetect/AHCI, RAID Autodetect/ATA, or RAID On. In this case, for instance, you would choose RAID AUTODETECT/ATA and your drive should come back.

Best wishes.

Hello,

I have the same problem, but I have the floppy drive. The problem appeared when the Floppy disk with the SATA drivers suddenly died. Can anybody send me a copy of that disk? It's a Maxtor SATA 80Gb (I think it's DiamondMax).

hey, I think I got the same HD, it's a maxtor 80 gig SATA. I think you have to make the disk using your MoBo installation cd. That's what I just did but the win xp setup won't show the maxtor drive in the list... might have to do something with the BIOS.

... my mobo is an asus K8V SE and here's the stuff I get in my bios:


OnChip SATA BOOTROM : Enabled

OnBoard Promise Controller : Enabled
Operating mode : RAID, or Onboard IDE operate mode (on what option should I set this???)

in the "POWER" menu I've got:

ACPI APIC Support

Should I disable this??

Would it also be a good idea to update my bios?

I tried once installing win xp with the ACPI thing off, and once with it on but the onboard controller set to IDE instead of RAID. I think this thing should be set on IDE, cause in the SATA drivers installations readme it says to check if it's set to raid or ide, and says to set it for rasi to install raid drivers and to set it for ide to installa SATA drivers. what I'll try to do is to insatall the drivers on the HD I'm using rieght now so win 2000 will detect de drive, then try to install win xp from there... is this possible? when I put the win xp cd in I get a menu with "install windows xp". I'll try this...

uh-oh... I just did install that driver and rebooted, now windows does detect my drive, I get the "new hardware found" window, and it asks me for another driver, and ti won't find it on the Asus cd. should I try to find it on win update? I think I'll have to email the Asus tech support now...

I also have a similar problem.. I figured out how to install the drivers and everything. so i my computer recognizes the SATA and so does windows. but i also had a 20 gig ide drive in that i had windows on before...i can load windows from the SATA but if i take the ide drive out then my computer freezes on one of the boot screens and it says "Verifying DMI pool" or something to taht effect and it just stays there. I just need to figure out how to fix this because i don't want to have to leave that ide drive in there all the time.

I have:
X-Blade case
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo
Athlon xp 3000+
ATI Radeon 9600 XT AIW
512mb Kingston RAM (PC2700)
Barracuda 80 gig SATA
DVDRW Drive

Nothin overclocked

take the drive away from the Bios, and reboot does it have the effect?

I did it! Actually I searched the net for the mobo disk, because the one I've made with the CD I got from MoBo it wasn't working (a lot of errors in a lot of modules...bla...bla...bla...).
So I got from the net a "disk that solves the F6 part of the Windows XP instalation", and it worked.
You do not have to do anything with the BIOS. Normally the XP should let you choose from the available SATA drivers that you have on your MoBo.
It should work.

well, I did the floppy disk for the installation and I'm trying to figure out why the hell the only drive that shows up in the list is my decade old 3 gig IDE drive... I'll call the store where I bought the drive from... surely they can help me.

well... I just called the store... they told me that I have to set somehting in my bios for "IDE" (instead of the default RAID setting). But that's what I did... doesn't work

They said it's because of my MoBo, it's pretty complicated and I could bring my machine to them so they do it form me. Problem is that... well it's pretty far away from home... I'd have to take one bus, subway and another bus again, and I don't want to carry the whole thing because it's a little heavy. They said they're used to it because many people using SATA + Asus K8V SE Mobo have similar problems. Hope they can do it for free. He told me the first thing I should do is get it installed in the Bios. Well maybe I should try to unplug my IDE drive and mess around with the Bios until it is detected or whatever. What is bad is that I've got a friend who's a HUGE computer nerd and did work in a computer store and could do it for me... except he's left in England now and will be back only in January

actually my sata drive doesn't even show up in BIOS, so i gues i see why. The system won't load because it doesn't recognize a hard drive in BIOS without the IDE drive being plugged in. So i have to find some way to make my BIOS recognize the SATA. Ive tried everythin in BIOS... scsi, hdd 1 - 3 or whatever, even some of the weird things i haven't heard of, but my system doesn't recognize it under any of them... so i dunno what to do.

Check a bit in BIOS. Besides the boot sequence, you should have a option to choose the primary drive to boot from, and if the MoBo supports SATA, you should have the option to choose "Onboard SATA device" and to make it the primary boot device. Anyway, it should be better to remove the IDE HDD from the comp when you're doing this. I don't have a IDE HDD and it worked for me. If this doesn't works, try to flash a fresh copy of BIOS you can find on the NET. It could help. (I did it).

Try to upgrade your BIOS also, it might help, and remove the IDE HDD from the comp. The BIOS will recognize your SATA. Take a look at my reply to popol.

ok... I'll try this, update the bios and remove that decade old drive from my new computer. MoBo does support SATA, but I didn't see anything such as "onboard SATA device" (not sure...) I noticed on boot up I get a "promiseSATA378" thing and it said it does not detect a drive. Strange, since the drive does show up in the bios. I'll try what you said and hope it works. Don't want to carry my computer all the way to the store. By the way I just checked and my HD is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9.

Actually, I just discovered that the HDD is not important. The thing that matters is the MoBo SATA controller.