Windows XP SATA HD Drivers install

Hi Guys

I have just bought a new hard drive with a SATA interafce as I heard they are easy to insall - small cable and fast.

I have a physical C and D drive aleardy (IDE) and wish to installl the new drive as an E drive, then I will copy the data from my D drive to my E drive and then remove the D drive and make the new Sata drive my D drive.

But I am having touble installing the Sata drive. It is a Seagate 160 Meg. My Award Bios seems to recognise it. But Windows XP does not, either via Control Panel, or through installl new hardware or through My Computer/Maintenance.

It seems that I need some SATA drivers for XP. I have a floppy with some SATA/RAID drivers but there seems to be no easy way to install these.

All the information I have seen says I can install them when installing XP by pressing F6 at the start. This is obviously for a new installation/set up. But how can I do it on my present set up ?

1.Do I have to use the floppies ?
2.Can I install using the Windows XP CD and then cancel out of installing XP over the top of my present system ?
3.Can I download and install some drivers directly from Microsoft ?

Any suggestions ?

Kind Regards

Digby

You sure it's drivers you need?

Maybe you just need to create a partition.

Does it show in Disk Management? Start>Control Panel>Administative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management.

Go to your motherboards web site and download drivers for your specific motherboard in there support downloads section. They usually will have instructions there as well. There may be a read me on your floppy that tells the two ways to installl as well (F6 and manual). You may also have to enter the disk settup at start and set up the sata drive as a raid 0 even if your not using raid. The motherboard site might also have a faq section to help you there as well.

Virtual body.

Thanks for that, but as I said XP My Computer right click Maintainance did not recognise the disk. But my BIOS seemed to.

Appzailein.

My motherboard's web site is slo slow and huge and clunky that I can't find a thing there. I found a web site that advised me to start re-installing windows press F6, then load up my Sata drivers from my floppy disk drive, then choose the Repair Option of XP which just reloads the OS without losing all of my desktop and data.

This worked ! But I had to re-activate XP straight away ! It would not even let me onto my desktop, so I had to phone Microsoft. Which I did and its now going all OK. (But it did give me a few heartaches thinking what had I done)

So now I have 3 hard drives in my machine C D and E. Boy is that Sata disk fast !

Thanks

Regards

Digby

Quote:

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Originally Posted by digmen1

Boy is that Sata disk fast !

Thanks

Regards

Digby

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Yeah, they're nice. But you didn't have to reinstall Windows.
Not for an extra storage drive.
Seagate, Western Digital, hell, even Maxtor, have tools to format/install their drives,
available freely on their web sites.
That would've saved you a lot of trouble.
I know I'm saying this a little late, yeah, but it may help you in the future.

Hi Fkudup

Thanks for that.
My drive was a Seagate and I had installed one of their drives before, using their own installation software called Diskwizard. I did go to their web site and got the latest version of it. But when I tried to use it my Sata drive was not recognised by Windows so Diskwizzard could not see it. I studied their FAQ's etc and all they said was that you need need to install the SATA drivers that came with your motherboard.

You would think that by now - 2006, ie 2 years after 2004 when SATA's first strated becoming popular that the drive manufacturers eg Seagate and Windows would load some SATA drivers as part of their systems, or at least make it easy to download and INSTALL them !

Perhaps other manufactruers are more on to it than Seagate.

But thanks for that. I am actually very proud of myslef as 2 technicians in the company I bought all my gear from could not help me on the phone after 5 phone calls, yet I managed to find that web site article that explained exaclty how to do it.

Windows XP installation has TWO repair options and the web article advised me to get through to the second one. That worked but then I had to re-activate XP oin the phone as it would not even let me in to my desktop at all. But once I had done that I was away again.

I will try to publicise my experiences a bit in case someone else tries to do the same. All I can say is that my SATA drive is very fast at transferring data. So I can't wait to get another one so that my C and D drives will both be SATA's.

Thansk

Kind Regards

Digby

Quote:

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Originally Posted by fkdup74

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by digmen1

Boy is that Sata disk fast !

Thanks

Regards

Digby

---

Yeah, they're nice. But you didn't have to reinstall Windows.
Not for an extra storage drive.
Seagate, Western Digital, hell, even Maxtor, have tools to format/install their drives,
available freely on their web sites.
That would've saved you a lot of trouble.
I know I'm saying this a little late, yeah, but it may help you in the future.

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Or if he wanted to transfer the windows over, just ghost!