Serial ATA Hard Drives

I have just purchased 2 80gb Serial ATA/150 Hard drives,
can I just install windows XP as if this was just a
normal hard drive?

Hello

Well yes you can or you can do a raid provided that your mother
supposrt raid, read your manual but if you just want to install the
drive and load XP you can,

Alvin'

wrote:

I have just purchased 2 80gb Serial ATA/150 Hard drives,
can I just install windows XP as if this was just a
normal hard drive?

Not exactly. (1) Does your motherboard support SATA (possibly in
combination with RAID)? If not, then you also need an SATA adapter card
that fits in a PCI slot. (2) If RAID, you have to "build a RAID array",
before you can use it. This is a pre-XP motherboard funciton, but above the
BIOS level. Common RAID options include striping, mirroring, and one disk =
one array. (3) You will also have to set the boot sequence in the BIOS
setup to include the SATA drive. This option maybe be called somehting like
other boot devices, SCSI/onboard ATA. Read the BIOS manual! (4) Early
during the XP installation you will be asked to provide a floppy with
drivers for any thrid party SCSI or RAID devices. SATA fits in this
catagory. The drivers must be on a floppy. If they come on a CD, you have
to transfer them to a floppy. (5) Otherwise, the XP installation should
work normally. I did this last Spring with two Seagate SATA drives on an
ASUS P4S8X motherboard and have been quite pleased. (6) Be warned that some
backup software will not recognize SATA drives, or only in a limited way.
If you have backup software, test it, both creating a backup and restoring
it. I have found that Norton GHOST 2003 work from DOS, but not from
windows. Acronis TrueImage can backup, but not restore, since it uses LINUX
to to the restore and has not incorporated the right drivers, yet.
DriveImage may work. None of these are officially supported for SATA.
wrote in message
...
I have just purchased 2 80gb Serial ATA/150 Hard drives,
can I just install windows XP as if this was just a
normal hard drive?