how do I install XP Pro SP2 on a SATA drive?

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noiro

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Oct 18, 2007
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I have read hints from several different places but so far nothing has helped this old man figure out why in the heck I can't get XP Pro to install on my Sata drive with my GA-P35-DS3L motherboard. I have tried turning the Native on and off, turning the AHCI on and off and disabling all of the stuff that is for Vista only, however still my PC refuses to acknowledge I have a SATA drive hooked up. It was suggested I buy a SATA DVD Rom to install the program, I did that and the DVD works just great, it tries to install XP but then it says no drives press F3. I have read in a few different places that the program should load up since the DVD is recognized, however no where are either of my two SATA drives noticed. I am trying only one drive at a time, at this point if I got one drive to work, I would be happier than a pig eating....well you get the idea. I have spent no less than 12 hours on this project now. I could have built and installed XP on 6 or 7 PCs in this time. I have been building PCs for several years but I guess I am just old and dumber than toast. If someone has simple step by step instructions I would appreciate it very much. I do wish I had never purchased this motherboard, however I am aware that SATA is the future so I would have to do it at some point. Thanks anyone and everyone that would be kind enough to lend a hand to this old guy. I wish you all the best and now I am off to bed before I get too angry that that stupid PC.
 
I had the same problem as you when I first got a Sata hard drive,I had to go to the moterboard website and get the sata drivers and put them on a floppy and then at the first of the XP install it will ask you to press F8(or F9 can't remember)to install additional drivers (it will say that at the bottom of the screen and it goes by very quick so make sure your finger is on the F8 button or F9 what ever key it is).

After you press the F8 key it will contiue on as if you never pressed it,don't worry later on it will prompt you for the drivers during the install process.

I hope that helps.

P.S it's not the motherboard it's windows XP sp2,the drivers for your motherboard arn't on it or on most of the newer motherboards going around.
 
Ok, you should not be having these problems. What is the hard drive model? Can you see the drive in BIOS? Did you try to boot the manufacturers diagnostic tools and check the drive and zero write it, and then try the XP load? Maybe try another copy of XP to see if it can see the drive. Maybe load a copy of Kubuntu temporarily to see if it loads.
 
I just built three systems with P35 DQ6 mobos and had no problems. I did not load drivers for AHCI. I don't understand all of the problems. One system was XP SP2 one was XP SP1 and one was XP professional SP1. All systems saw the drives immediately and loaded XP flawlessly. Maybe it was the drive, although I find that hard to believe.
 
I built my last system on a GA-G33M-DS2R with XP SP2, and had no difficulties. All drives were recognized by the BIOS, and XP installed from a SATA DVD onto my SATA primary HDD without any additional drivers.
 
Thanks to all of you for your advice, I will give it a try as soon as I relay the information that was asked for. The two drives are both Western Digital as follows: WD2500KS and a WD3200KS. Neither one of them show in the bios although as stated last night the DVD-R does. I have tried 3 different copies of Windows XP Pro SP2 (all of them legal) to no avail as of my writing last night. I did however on the way home stop and purchase from a Computer wholesaler an ATA 133 Disk Accelerator which allows you to plug the Accelerator card into a PCI slot and it gives you an IDE port at 133 Mhz. If I have to I will use it to run this PC and forget the SATA for another day. That would be admitting defeat though which I am not real excited about doing. If nothing else I guess I can use the DVD on the sata plug in and use my IDE drives on the IDE MB plugin. Exasperation just hits me squarely in the face over and over. Thanks again to all of you for your assistance and insight, I will give it my best shot. Bobb, how do I set the bios on SATA1? I dont' see anything that allows me to do that, but I will look again.
 
If they don't show up in BIOS Windows won't see them. I'm sure you have power to the drives, and they are plugged into SATA0,1 and that you have set the BIOS to performance defaults. If so, I don't know why they can't be recognized by the BIOS. Do another CMOS clear with the pins on the mobo, consult the manual for the procedure if you need to. Maybe borrow another drive and test it only to the BIOS screen. Grasping at straws, use the known good SATA cable from the DVD.
 


Hey Zorg, if you are using AHCI, you have to load the F6 drivers. If you didn't then you are not using AHCI. AHCI must be enabled in the BIOS before installing Windows. If you don't install the F6 drivers then when you get to the section where you select which drive you want to install Windows on, the drive will not appear. I have played with this extensively. The other thing is it can't be enabled after Windows has been installed. I tried after installing under Native to change it to AHCI in the BIOS and it BSOD's during bootup. Now of course this is for XP, I have no experience with Vista so I don't know if it's supported without install time drivers.
 

I'll say it again, I just built 3 systems with 3 raptors, 2 150G and 1 74G, and they are all running as IDE. If AHCI has to be enabled before installing XP then how could you possibly have the problem of trying to enable AHCI after XP is installed. Here are a couple of Pics of my BIOS that prove that my Raptor is running in IDE mode not AHCI. I have no idea what you did but the drives will be recognized in BIOS as native IDE and windows will load. You only need the drivers, and apparently only in XP not Vista (I have not personally confirmed this), if you want SATA Features like hot swap, RAID or NCQ.

Edit: Oh I get it, you didn't read the post that I was responding to and I didn't say you don't need to run in AHCI for the BIOS to see the drive and load XP. My post was in response to Fonzy exacerbating the situation by saying that RAID/AHCI drivers needed to be loaded. I was simply saying that they don't, and that XP could, and even should, be loaded on the drives set as IDE. Less chances for problems for someone that is already having problems. I hope that is your confusion.


f9fwat.jpg

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All u need to do is put the drivers for the sata (from ur motherboard cd) on a floppy disk and us F6 to load the drivers and it will work.
 
Read the OP and be responsive. This isn't a thread about how to RAID it is a thread about not being able to load XP, or more precisely about the BIOS not recognizing the SATA HDDs. You got an answer for that? Please share.
 


Dude if u read the title of the thread it says the man wants to install win xp pro on an sata drive. I have an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe MB which has an onboard sata controller (SiI 3112A) and 2 sata hdd's (WD2500KS and a samasung SP2504C) and whenever I need to install win xp I have to load the sata drivers first (using F6 in the begining of the installation process) because the win installation doesn't recodnize my onboard sata chip and thinks I don't have any hdds installed on my system. Oh.. the bios doesn't recodnize the hdds either.
 
Then you might try reading a little more than the title. You know like some of the posts, Uh, maybe just the first one. You would understand that the OP can't load XP on a SATA drive, not that he wants to load XP with RAID or AHCI. It's OK if you want to be non responsive because you are making a joke or responding on a side topic which is unrelated to the OP. What irritates me is people that give information that is either stale or in no way assists the OP in solving his problem. Unfortunately your post was one of those.

Edit: I just realized that your mobo wouldn't see the drive. I apologize for jacking you up. If you will notice he has a Gigabyte P35 mobo. I know, and you can determine from my posts, that no AHCI drivers are needed. The BIOS will see the drives and everything will load as IDE. Sorry for your troubles.
 


@zorg: So acording to u fonzy is on topic but I'm way off topic.... ok man.... whatever...
 
Did you bother to read my response to fonzy? If you read that and my other posts in this thread you would not have posted that. I understand now that you had the same problem but I don't believe he is in the same situation, mobo wise. I just got aggravated because so many people jump to the end of the thread without spending the time in between to determine whether the post is on target. This actually causes additional confusion for the person in need of help.
 
Thanks to all of you again, it has finally installed XP Pro on a SATA drive and it recognized both of them with no issues at all. The only thing I did differently was I decided to use the SATA power plug instead of the legacy power plug. Both drives had SATA and legacy (3 pin) plugs. I was using the 3 pin because I had so many of those I could use from my power supply. Once I unplugged everything and plugged it all back up using the SATA power plugs, it worked like a charm. DOH, I feel pretty stupid about now. Thanks to all of you for your input and showing that you want to help others. It is pretty fantastic to belong to a group that is willing to take their time to help others. I will stick around and hopefully someday can help someone else.
 
You should not feel stupid. I have a Raptor, with both SATA and 4 pin MOLEX power inputs, I used the 4 pin MOLEX plug for a while. It should work no problem. The only thing that you can't do is use both SATA and legacy (4 pin MOLEX) power plugs together. Supposedly it will damage the drives. So if you used the legacy power it should have worked. What I did to ensure that I didn't dork, which I do too often, is to cut off an old MOLEX plug and plug it into the legacy power input on the drive. I used a glue gun to seal the wires on the plug, this isn't needed but I am a little ana*.

Happy to see you got it working, I knew it had nothing to do with setting it up as AHCI.
 
Read the thread before posting! [:zorg:2]
 
Don't know if you will ever get this. . .
I have a Rampage Formula board with two WD 500AAKS SATA drives.
XP Pro started the install and when it got to which drive to install, all it saw was 131070MB on disk 0 bus 0 on atapi.
Now then, I've been building computers since the early 90s and this has been my ONLY major problem. Neither Asus or WD helped at all.
I couldn't get XP to install - NO WAY. I contacted Asus and they said 'busted southbridge' - sent me a new board. No change. Contacted WD and they said 'busted drive' - sent me a new one. No change.
I formatted the new drive to 20MB primary, active on the same computer using Vista on the second WD 500AAKS hard drive then removed the Vista drive and installed the targeted XP drive. It recognized the 20MB partition and started the install but then BSODd and I just about threw in the towel.
Using NLite I slipstreamed my XP disk with SP2 and threw in a couple SATA drivers, deleted the partition on the hard drive, started the install and BINGO it's working.
The real kicker, when I built the system in June 08 I installed XP then SP2 afterward and everything worked fine. It wasn't until I had a problem in Dec 08 and I reformatted the disk and tried to install XP Pro that my grief started. Never changed the BIOS or hardware settings.
Still haven't gotten my head around this one.
BTW, BIOS always recognized each drive.
I currently have 3 WD 500AAKS drives, a WD 750 AAKS and two IDE CD/DVD drives.
XP Pro is on one drive, Vista Ultimate 32 on another, Vista Ultimate 64 on a third and Win 7 Beta on a fourth - because I can.
Scotty
 
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