Comments on: Installing Windows XP On a SATA Hard Drive

By: Andy

Andy — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:39:27 +0000

Hi Tim
Thanks for the comment. I’ll let you be the guinea pig on this Let me know how it goes.

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 21:47:41 +0000

Andy
My experience with SATA is about 2 years. As above Floppy is all that will install SATA drivers. I think what is happening is the IDE drivers were installed because the MB can use both SATA and IDE. I would find my driver set and install them on the drive in the driver section of Windows with a DOS copy. Do a system point restore prior to this and attempt a reboot. If not good probably a system restorwe will bring you back. The key word is probably. I too have an issue I am trying to work around similar to yours. I am going to attempt my own advice shortly. Buying a cheap Tbyte as a backup to what you have may be good insurance for protecting the hours involved already.

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 06:35:50 +0000

I’m still confused as to what to do ?
I have a DELL Dimension 9150 which came with a dual SATA disk RAID 0 array. After 5 years one of the drives died and so I lost all the data.
So I bought a 1TB WD1002FAEX-00Y9AO SATA drive and this time thought I would just install that 1TB disk without bothering with RAID. Anyway the BIOS said it saw it as a SATA drive with a Linkspeed of 3.0Gbs and the settings were Raid Auto/AHCI which said that if there was a Raid Array it would use it, otherwise it would just use AHCI, which I thought was fine.
Anyway I installed from my original XP CD and then spent the next several days installing and rebooting to apply the hundreds of MS patches.
Anyway I got it fully up to date with SP3 etc as per Windows Update and then spent another 2 weeks installling and configuring all my old software and restoring what data I had not lost from backups.
Everything seemed fine, except perhaps a little slower than I had anticipated, and I noticed that some diagnostic software was reporting my hard drive as a bottleneck. So I had a look in Device Manager and saw that it although it lists a Intel 82801GR/GH SATA AHCI controller under the section IDE/ATAPI Controllers, when I look at the disk drive entry for WDC WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0, it says under properties that it is using a Micrsoft driver dated 1/07/2001 version 5.1.2535.0
From reading numerous articles about XP and SATA v IDE drives I am not sure that somehow I am using a SATA drive with IDE drivers. Is this possible ? I didn’t install any special drivers using F6 or suchlike when I installed XP from scratch as I wasn’t using a SCSI drive or going to use RAID. Now people seem to suggest that I need to start from scratch and install everything again. I was hoping that it would be as simple as using Computer Manager to install new drivers (ie the SATA ones) under the hard drive setting ?
I really can’t got through another 3 weeks re-doing all the installs and configurations I have done.
So my question is;
1) Am I running using SATA as the BIOS says or
2) Am I running using IDE as Computer Manager says ?
If it is IDE do I really have to redo everything from scratch ?

By: cheng

cheng — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:06:58 +0000

I’m wrong.XP setup doesn’t search except FDD

By: cheng

cheng — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:34:14 +0000

with a new computer nowsday you may replace the floppy drive with a usb flash disk which can be identify by BIOS of motherboard

By: Rob Wilson

Rob Wilson — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 18:39:43 +0000

Recently, I faced this same problem.

My motherboard supports both IDE and SATA hard drive (HD) controllers, and has no floppy drive; so, here is my simple solution.

1. Borrow an IDE HD from a friend
2. Install IDE HD
3. Install XP on IDE HD
4. don’t run windows update
5. download a disk mirror program - I used Macrium reflect:
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp
6. Create image of IDE HD
7. restore image of IDE HD to SATA HD
8. shutdown computer
9. remove power cable and remove IDE HD
10. plug power cable in and turn on computer
11. if your bios is setup to boot from your SATA devices, Win XP will load properly.

ps. don’t forget to give the IDE HD back to it’s proper owner

cheers,
Rob

By: Carlos Guevara

Carlos Guevara — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:49:19 +0000

I got my Xp install to go past the blue screen by using the program nLite and integerating ahcix86.inf to Xp install.But now my problem is when the xp install gets to the part where i select the drive or partition i want to install to it shows my partitions with no available space” Its says they have 0 mbs. I try to install anyways,tghen it give me a message saying something like this is a dynamic drive u can try formating the partition. So I try that and it tells me tthat inorder to format the partition it could format my whole hdd. Which I dont wanna do. So I hit F# to Cancel and Ièm back at square one.
I have a notebook compaq 15.6″ Laptop featuring AMD Athlon II Dual-Core Processor P340 (CQ56-148CA). I love Xp and I really want to downgrade. please help me

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:12:34 +0000

Cutter,

Thanks for the follow-up. I know a lot of people who are hitting this page are having various issues getting their SATA drives setup aside from just needing to know how to load the drivers from the MB disk, so this will provide some really helpful tips. I also like having a reference I can come back to if I ever have someone asking me a similar question.

As for the drivers and SP you might be able to look into “Slipstreaming” them onto the disk. I have never personally used this technique, but it was another method mentioned for installing SATA drivers onto a system when there is no floppy drive available. (By embedding them into the installation disk.)

Thanks!

By: Cutter

Cutter — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 23:28:25 +0000

Paul,

Thanks for your information… I’m reminded of the Dilbert strip where the boss says, “I want to browse the Internet. Get me a hardcopy”.

Here is the FIX that (apparently) worked for me:

1) Partition only the first 130GB (displayed) of the new SATA hard drive.
2) New install of W2000 Pro using F6 & driver disk from MB manufacturer (cleverly disguised as a RAID driver, but contains non-RAID drivers also).
3) Create the following entry with REGEDIT:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic
es\atapi\Parameters]
“EnableBigLba”=dword:00000001

This is done by adding the dword item EnableBigLba and then giving it a value of 1.

Through much BIOS-switching I was able to copy all the partitions of my IDE drive over to the SATA, but could not figure out how to retroactively get the installed W2000 to recognize the full drive, despite reapplying SP4 with the drivers (which showed up in the device manager) and applying the registry patch.

After the registry patch on the new install, the administrative tools disk management appeared willing to partition the newly discovered extra space. I instead used Partition Magic under DOS to see what would happen if I extended the last partition’s size so that the partitioned area was about 150GB. I rebooted without issue, and the disk management properly reported the sizes, so it looks like the problem is solved.

Now I need to figure out how to incorporate the service pack, SATA drivers and registry fix into an install CD, since otherwise I doubt a fresh install will be possible without clearing the drive of everything beyond +/-128GB.

I hope this helps future generations & will repost if/when I figure out the above. To answer your question, the drive was connected directly to the MB. Thanks again!

“another fun weekend from the guy who gave us the 64KB barrier!”

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 14:22:59 +0000

Cutter,

Strange, what you are describing reminds me of an issue that was more prevalent several years ago involving a 127gb – 137gb limitation with older versions of Windows (circa Windows 2000). Basically to format the drive to its full capacity you needed to make sure that you have all your Windows updates (which it sounds like you do).

If that is the case I would recommend searching “Windows 127gb” as it’s been a few years since I have dealt with this.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=windows+127gb

Also if you are currently using the drive through a controller, would it be possible to connect it without the controller (for troubleshooting purposes) just to see how the capacity is displayed if it is not in the array.

Here is a link I found on the Seagate website regarding the “Windows 127gb” search:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=Windows_XP_-_Operating_System_-_127_GB_-_137_GB_Limitation&vgnextoid=2f9b5b1142aec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Sorry I can’t be more specific in regard to this issue. Good luck.