XP on SATA hard drive

[mrfun1981]

HI guys need a little bit of help please.

At the mo iv got XP installed on my IDE hard drive but i want to take it out as iv got another use for it. Il be then left with 2 sata hard drives.

I want to be able to install XP on my sata hard drive BUT i dont have a floppy drive to be able to install the sata drivers during installation. So can some 1 please tell me if there is a way i can make a cd with windows XP on it AND the sata drivers please.

I would be very great full if some1 could tell me if this can be done & how plz, (im a bit of a noob so im hoping it will be easy to do)

Many thanks to any1 that can help me

[tesco]

some motherboards will let the xp setup recognize your sata drive without needing any drivers.
Are you sure yours isn't one of them?

[mrfun1981]

some motherboards will let the xp setup recognize your sata drive without needing any drivers.
Are you sure yours isn't one of them?

Yes i am cos when ever iv had to reformat my IDE hard drive b4 its NEVER gave me a option to reformat & install 1 of my sata hard drive during the installation progess

[lynx]

If you really want to do a complete reinstallation of XP then you need to make a copy of the contents of your XP disk into a folder on your system, then "slipstream" the drivers into that folder, and finally burn a new CD. Look up slipstream to find out how to do it.

Alternatively, you can install the drivers onto your existing XP system (if you haven't already done so), then simply make a copy of the partition from your IDE drive to your SATA drive using Ghost or Partition Magic. Remove the IDE drive and make the SATA drive the primary and you are good to go.

[mrfun1981]

Thanks for that,

Il go and google "slipstream" an see what it comes up with (hope its easy to do)

I did think of learning how to ghost my IDE on to my SATA an be happy with doing that but on average i reformat my PC every 3/4 months so i wanted to be able to master getting the drivers on there now so i dont have the problem in the future

Thanks again
Cheers

[clocker]

You want to use nLite.

Not only can you slipstream most of your drivers (anything ".inf" but NOT executables...so SATA drivers will work) but you can preenter all of the info Windows normally asks for (PID, time zone, etc) so the install is unattended as well.
Also, much of the useless crap included in the install can be deleted (support for 8 million keyboard layouts, for example) so your Windows install can be made very lightweight...my XP pro weighs in at just over 700MB when installed.

[muyoso]

Can't you just boot up the IDE drive, stick in the windows CD, when the popup comes, click new install and tell it to instal on the SATA drive? It will then install on the sata drive, which will alow you to both boot from it and access the original IDE drive and take anything off of it you want before formatting it. Thats exactly what I used to do.