A General Question....

I am building a new PC for my Dad's Christmas present...mostly from leftover parts shed during Sprocket's neverending metamorphasis.
Not a barnburner, but a definite upgrade from his current POS Compaq, the machine will drag him kicking and screaming into (semi) modern technology.

As I planned the project, I ran across my stash of Serillel PATA to SATA adaptors (come with NF7-S boards) and thought "Aha! This will make for clean cabling to the optical drives..." so I decided to use them.

Indeed, they do make the case interior neater by replacing the bulky IDE cables with thin, easily routed SATA cables.

As I sat admiring my finished machine, a thought occurred to me.
Installing Windows onto a SATA HDD (which this PC has, BTW) requires loading the SATA drivers first thing, or XP can't recognize the drive.
Would the optical drive be similarly hidden from XP ( making the whole process impossible) without the drivers, too?

I figured what the hell, and proceeded to fire her up and see what happened.

Worked perfectly.

So my question is:
How come the CD-RW drive was functional before the install of the SATA drivers when the HDD is not?

There is prolly a very simple answer to this, but I don't know it and would like to.
Educate me, please.

Hmmm. Interesting...

I had never tried that. I'm going to study this today.

That would make you wonder why you cannot use drivers from a CD instead of the floppy.

Edit: I suppose that if you needed the drivers to 'see' an optical drive then you would never be able to get to the point where you need to press a key to use SATA drivers. :huh:

i'm thinking the mobo recognised it and went wit the flow

Up to the point of the first reboot the hardware is under the control of the bios, so it is available. This is similar to safe mode. The drivers have to be installed before the reboot.

After the reboot windows uses the drivers. If they haven't been installed this is the point at which it fails to find devices connected through that controller.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by lynx

Up to the point of the first reboot the hardware is under the control of the bios, so it is available. This is similar to safe mode. The drivers have to be installed before the reboot.

After the reboot windows uses the drivers. If they haven't been installed this is the point at which it fails to find devices connected through that controller.

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windows always fucks it up :P

From what I can figure out is that in order for the connection to be able to have 150 Mbytes/sec transfers, Windows needs drivers. I guess the optical drives work because they don't need that speed of connection.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by lynx

Up to the point of the first reboot the hardware is under the control of the bios, so it is available. This is similar to safe mode. The drivers have to be installed before the reboot.

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Then why won't Windows even "see" a SATA HDD to install the OS to before loading the drivers?

VB,
Interesting theory, but why would Windows even care if the drive was slow?
That would seem to be more of a "user issue" than an installation roadblock.

Obviously the SATA chip is at least partially functional on the BIOS hardware level or the CD-RW would not be usable at the beginning of the process.
The HDD is not, for some reason.

It just struck me as odd and no one at work can explain it either.

I don't think it's a hardware level issue. I think it's an issue where a Windows driver needed to communicate between the onboard controller and the chip in the drive. Just a Windows issue really.

I think the optical drive works because it doesn't have the same chip at the drive end.

Right then.

That's the story we'll go with.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by clocker

Then why won't Windows even "see" a SATA HDD to install the OS to before loading the drivers?

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Simple, there wouldn't be much point in wasting your time installing XP, only for you to find out later that it is unusable, which is what it used to do under NT4 with some configurations.

Quote:

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Obviously the SATA chip is at least partially functional on the BIOS hardware level or the CD-RW would not be usable at the beginning of the process.
The HDD is not, for some reason.

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The Sata HDD is obviously fully functional under bios, otherwise you would not be able to boot from it. :rolleyes: