SATA Drivers Work Around

[mtakridge]

OK. I have read all the stuff about having to have SATA drivers on floppy but is their any work around?

I built my system and got it up and running and then bought a 200 Gb SATA drive. It loaded great and I can see the hole 200 Gb as one partician. When I boot (ASUS motherboard) and hit F8 it will let me pick that drive to boot from and loads and runs great.

If I turn it off it reverts back to the old C drive (thank you god for not letting me reformat that one). I called ASUS and they say you have to have a floopy to load the drivers on and load to XP but I don't have a floppy.

Does anyone have a work around to beat this system?

 

[rushm001]

You need to load the SATA drivers from a floppy when installing windows, but once this is installed windows will work fine without the disk. There isn't a "beating" the system it's just that additional drivers are needed for SATA hard disks. The asus website should have the drivers you need for the SATA driver on your motheboard.

 

[LeeJend]

If you keep your old HD installed and it is a system drive Windows will go back and boot from it. Disconnect the old drive and try to boot just from the new drive. I suspect the boot will fail, Windows may be pulling files from the old drive when you boot.

If the new drive won't boot do a reapir install. This is where you may need a floppy with the drivers. The alternative is you can "slipstream" your copy of windows onto a blank CD with the SATA drivers on it. Search slipstream. There are multiple posts in here and elsewhere with instructions. Also there are two good, free tools (nlite and I foget the other) to help you easily build a custom windows install CD with all required drivers, service packs and security updates so no downloading is required.

 

[amulcahy]

Hi,

I'm not a HW guy so excuse the question if it's silly.

I had lots of problems with my HP XP Pro (upgraded from Home) with a 'hal.dll' error. Eventually sorted everything with Windows recovery and PC has been working fine (relatively) since. One thing that is not working since I 'repaired' is SATA. To get the repair to run I had to disable SATA in the BIOS. I did not add the SATA drivers during the repair so now I would like to fix the SATA as I am told the PC will run faster.

To show my lack of HW knowledge - it was the first time I ever heard of SATA. If I enable SATA now, I get a blue screen on startup (too fast to get the message).

Is there any way to update the driver without re-installing Windows?

Thanks.