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Old March 20th 11, 05:40 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.setup_deployment,microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics,microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support,microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
BillW50
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Posts: 5,556
Default Can XP Pro be installed on a SATA drive?

On 3/20/2011 11:07 AM, Steve Hayes wrote:
On Sun, 20 Mar 2011 08:47:54 -0500, wrote:

Yes, it is true. Windows XP doesn't come with any SATA drivers and you
must (if you need them) install them in the very beginning of the
install by pressing F6 to install RAID, SATA, or any other device
driver(s) to work with Windows XP. And this is usually done by having
the driver(s) on a floppy disk. Yes an USB floppy drive will work too.


Strange.

I had XP installed on a machine with two IDE drives, and when I wanted toi
upgrade to a bigger one, I had to battle to find one, because they were all
selling SATA drives. Eventually I found one, but then other things started to
go wrong with the machine, do I bought a new one with two SATA drives.

I backed up the system on the old machine, restored it on the new one, and it
worked perfectly. So it must have SATA drivers somewhere to work with the SATA
drives. I didn't install a thing, just copied the whole lot.


There is a good reason for this. As "many SATA controllers offer
selectable modes of operation: legacy Parallel ATA emulation, standard
AHCI mode, or vendor-specific RAID... Legacy mode is a software
backward-compatibility mechanism intended to allow the SATA controller
to run in legacy operating systems which are not SATA-aware or where a
driver does not exist to make the operating system SATA-aware."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance...ller_Interface

Thus if you are running your SATA controller in legacy mode, you don't
need a SATA driver. Although you also give up the advantages of AHCI.

And your claim that you copied Windows XP from one system and restored
on another system sounds very fishy if you ask me. As unless the two
systems are very much alike, it just won't work. As when Windows
installs, it loads the correct CPU, chipset, etc. drivers for that
machine. And moving it to another system, the odds are great that it
will be all wrong and it won't work at all.

There are ways to fix this. As sometimes a repair install can correct
this. And there are programs like Paragon Adaptive Restore that plugs in
all generic drivers which should work far better to make it runnable.
Then you allow Windows to detect all of the new devices to replace the
generic drivers.


--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era)
Centrino Core Duo 1.83G - 2GB - Windows XP SP3
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