I've never had to do a HD installation for a SATA drive before... My friend tried to dual install M$2000 and XP which worked but the hard drive crashed - not recoverable... so he bought a new one and put his XP home bootdisk in and it pre-loads the files it needs then says that there are no hard drives in the PC... Everywhere I Googled I found that XP doesn't have the drivers to identify a SATA drive so you have to load them seperately... That's where I seem to hit a wall... alot of the threads say to get a proggie called nLite and create a boot disc incorporating the updated drivers...this is something that I've never done before...so I am iffy on just charging in and making it worse.... Have any of you had this issue and how did you resolve it?.....
Couple things: Right as the XP setup loads, hit F6 to load additional drivers. You'll need the motherboard storage drivers and put them on a floppy disk (usually the drivers are just inf and sys files). The F6 option will look at the floppy disk for the drivers and XP will be able to see the hard drive. I have a usb floppy drive for these occasions since the new PCs don't usually come with them.
Yeah...I forgot to mention about the floppy drive part... So do I have the floppy and the XP disk in and boot it?..or one then the other?... (if we load up a floppy on it) From what I gathered the nLite program takes those files then merges them with the info from the install CD then creates a whole new Boot CD....now containing the driver files in it...
It'll stubbornly look for the files in the floppy drive as I recall. Had that problem with my Promise RAID controller - had the fucking drivers on a CD, on another drive in the computer, etc. But no, I had to have them on a floppy drive... WTF?!?
Yeah.....at one point it asked for the floppy and we tried to get around it....but nothing worked... I'll bash more on it tomorrow... I have some old floppy drives laying around and his PC has the right connectors to put one in.... I just didn't think I'd have to.... I never even knew that they had a USB version too....weird....
I used the same place hans did for a long time. It works very well. On the other hand , you'd be surprised how intuitive nLite is. It's very simple. You just need a copy of XP on a disc or copied to the drive, and your drivers. Try it. You'll be surprised.
I'm surprised that Samsung doesn't have drivers available on their website.... unless I missed them... its a HD642JJ model....all I could find were manuals... The nLite looked pretty simple... but that's how it always starts...
Did you put the motherboard (sometimes called storage) drivers on a floppy disc or are you looking at the hard drive firmware?
You don't need a driver for the HDD; you need a driver for the SATA controller. Tell us what chipset the motherboard has, and we'll be able to point you to the location of the drivers for it. If you want to install without having to go through any of this, then go into the BIOS and change the SATA mode from AHCI to IDE. By doing this you basically lose any advantages SATA has over IDE, but you'll be able to install Windows XP as usual.
I sent him a text about the chipset..... so I'll get to you on that.... I know its a Dell 8400 rev.00a or rev.a00 system... If I do the BIOS change can I just change it back once Windows is installed and updated? I think I found the drivers for the mobo..... So with my XP sp2 boot disk and those driver files I can use nLite to make a new boot CD with the drivers installed... if I am reading the other pages right.....
okay...so he went into the setting but none of the options are to do what you said....here is what he gets.... 1. RAID autodetect/ahci=raid if signed drives, otherwise ahci 2. Raid autodetect/ata=raid is signed drives, otherwise ata 3. raid on=sata is configured for raid on every boot 4. combination = sata/pata combination mode He went out and bought Vista and it won't load....this time all it does is go to the black screen with the white cursor box like its going into DOS but he can't type anything.... Maybe he has some other hardware issue then?....
All BIOS interfaces are not identical. My guess is either 2 or 4. I'd try loading the BIOS defaults, picking option 2, booting from the Windows XP CD, and seeing if it lets him complete the installation. If not, pick option 4 and try again. If he's not savvy, doing simple things such as this could take ages. Either way, I don't think that's the problem now. I was looking at the specs listed here, here, and here, and I realized that the controller on that mobo is SATA 150, whereas the HDD is SATA 300. You need to use this tool to change over to SATA 150 because there's no jumper for this purpose on the drive itself, and SpinPoints don't autonegotiate. Computers can be a PITA sometimes! BTW, if you decide to go the nLite route after you get the HDD thing sorted out, you'll need the zipped versions of these drivers.
DAMN!!!! Thanks man....you got a shit ton of info.... That kicks ass!.... He took the old drive to Frys and got the new one.... I didn't even think to check to make sure he got the right one....(150 vs 300).... I figured the person at Frys would have helped him get the right one...they are usually pretty good about that stuff... Those were the same drivers and tool I found last night... So I was barking up the right tree at least.... I had him try options 1 and 2 but neither of them got him any further.... but I feel he may have done that wrong.... I told him to hold off until this weekend...so I can get over there and do it myself...
So... he just went out and got another PC and brought me the one I was working on here... He took the new drive and put it in the new system and now has a WD160JS model - it has a jumper to make it be 150 and the BIOS sees it.....but WinXP can't find it to load on.... Would that imply that I need to find the storage drivers still?....The BIOS has the SATA as SATA-0 in the hardware list... Here is what shows in the BIOS; Controller details: * Controller = Serial ATA * Port = SATA-0 Drive details: * Drive ID = WDC WD1600-JS-00NCB1 * Capacity = 160 GB * BIOS = This drive is controlled by the System BIOS EDIT: Ivanolo - I downloaded the driver set listed on that last link you gave me. There were 8 downloads but I only got the one labeled: [FONT=Arial,helvetica]32-bit Floppy Configuration Utility for Intel® Matrix Storage Manager version 7.0.0.1020[/FONT][FONT=Arial,helvetica] - [/FONT]the description under it said it was for the F6 process on boot.... So I figured that was the one....or do I need them all?.... it didn't look like it though....
K... thanks Hans... I put a floppy in my main PC and loaded the drivers for it.... Now I gotta put the other one back together and see what happens! EDIT: Well, I put a floppy on my PC and it worked so I made the disk..... Then I put a floppy in the other one and it doesn't work. I have 3 different cables and 3 different floppies..... but no combination would work.... either it would get a solid light and stay that way or it wouldn't power up at all.... I'm going to swing by a place tomorrow to get a USB floppy..... This is frustrating...
Usually if the light stays on with the floppy drive the interface cable is connected backwards. Flip it over and try again before ya go out and start digging around for a new flop drive..
Yeah - I flipped it around on each of them but then the light doesn't come on at all and the system won't find it. It doesn't make any kind of sense.... WOW - USB floppy drives are 50 bucks?....damn! EDIT: I got it to recognize the floppy drive.... but the disk I made with that utility Ivanolo found didn't work for some reason..... Now I gotta look into it more.....
The Intel storage drivers work for all 9xx chipsets, I believe. Download the one that's zipped, and unzip the contents to the floppy. If that doesn't work, you're not doing it right. The other option is to download the zipped one, unzip it to a folder of your choosing, and use nLite.
dude, nlite is the way to go. No problems with drivers, S/N and settings. All you do is pop the disc in and tell it what to format.
I GOT IT!!!! I didn't think it would ever happen! I was about to give up and re-do that nLite deal but the floppy finally took!... Got the OS loaded and everything works like a dream! And I have enough spare parts to build me a secondary PC out of the scraps that I got from a friend at work today!.... It's older.....so it will be easier to work on....
