Windows Installer and SATA drives
 

Ok, i am having a weird problem, and im curious if anyone knows some sort of solution to it.

I have had windows and everything running off a 120GB hard drive for quite a while. Upgraded the comp, and got a 160GB Seagate SATA drive to replace it. When im in windows, booting off the old drive, it recognizes it. I ran seagates software, then formated and partitioned the 160gb. Everything reads and runs fine. So i got to install windows...

I took off the power connection to teh old 120gb drive, this way when windows installs, it only sees the new drive, and doesn't try and do anything wierd to the old one. Shouldn't be a problem - just installing windows to a blank drive. Well when i turn it on, and the installer goes through and does its thing, it goes to the blue screen with "starting windows" . Cool. But when i say i want to install a fresh copy of windows, it goes to scan for hard drives adn previous versions of windows. Then it comes up saying that it didn't detect ANY hard drives atached to the computer. WTF?

So my question is this. Windows sees the drives, and the windows installer doesn't. Does the windows installer not support Serial ATA drives? Has anyone heard of problems similar to this, or have suggestions on how to fix it?

Don't you need to provide a driver disk for the controller when starting the install ?

I know I had to do that when the new UATA drives came out.

Just a thought.

Just after you boot to the Windows 2000/XP CD you should see something that says "press F6 to install third party RAID drivers" hit F6 and install the SATA divers that came with your mother board and that should make the windows installer see it.

Exactly, generally your motherboard SHOULD have came with a floppy disk with the drivers. Once its loaded, it will somtimes show more then 1 type of driver, such as Intel lalalalal or Silicaon Valley lalalala.

You can be safe with either one usually, I've had great luck using SI.

If the SATA controller is integrated into your mobo chipset (for instance Intel 865/875), it will function just like a "normal" IDE controller.

If it's a separate card or embedded device (SiliconImage, Via, etc), or your chipset-based controller has a RAID mode and you're using it, you'll need to do the F6 thing.

Also the 865/875 boards' BIOSes have an option to address the IDE/SATA controllers in "Legacy" or "Enhanced" mode. Enhanced means both IDE and both SATA channels are enabled; Legacy means only two total channels are functional, and there's generally another option to specify which 2 of the 4 are active.

One more option in the BIOS should allow you to specify the order in which the disks are addressed...

Dumb question, you are dealing with XP or 2000...not 98/Me...right? I wouldn't expect 98 to address most SATA controllers correctly as the boot controller.

Well the bios is all set up to adress and understand SATA drives and all that nonsense. No big deal. The problem is that when it asks for a manufacturer supplied driver disk, i pop it in, it reads it, and tells me to put in teh driver disk - its not finding the drivers on the cd. So i pulled it up in windows, and it looks like its buried really deep in the file structure. So my guess is that its not going deep enough in its search of the disk to find it. So im gonna try pulling just the drivers i need off of the disk, and put just those on a separate disk just for windows installs.

If that doesn't work, who knows what ill do. MSI only gave me 1 disk, and windows doesn't like it.

Oh, and its a MSI k8t-NEO FSR board. i believe the SATA/raid controller is a VIA vt8237? Just off the top of my head, but i think that sounds right.

Windows Setup's F6 diskettes need to have a file named TXTSETUP.OEM in the root level of the diskette, which is a script that gives Setup the driver information and maps the files needed in any subdirectories. If they didn't set it up correctly, or if there's a bad sector on the disk (neither of which I'd put past MSI), it won't work.

Best suggestion here: download http://www.msi.com.tw/program/suppor...IDE_Driver.exe, copy everything in the drivers\SATA\ folder to a freshly formatted diskette, and try once more.

yeah, i got it working yesterday. They didn't supply me with a diskette, just a cd with drivers and utilities for windows. Bah. And i was stupid and didn't read the windows installer prompt telling me to put a disk into the a: drive (floppy). So i went in and dug around on the cd till i found the drivers, popped em onto a disk and it worked.

a little more work than i was planning on doing, but now that i look back on it it wasn't really a big deal. And i think it will be worth it, as i really like this serial drive over the normal slow ones.

Gotta love companies that put that ever so important information on a CD for a motherboard. How in the hell am I supposed to use the CD to get the drivers for the motherboard before I have the computer built???

At the repair shop I used to work in...we once got a batch of multimedia kits with this problem.

(Back in the 486 days, the 1x/2x CD drives were usually connected to the sound card; IDE CD drives didn't exist yet)

The CD controller on the card didn't activate until the DOS driver for the sound card was loaded...and the drivers were on a CD-ROM.

*duhhhh*

Peryn: glad to hear you're up & running. Please hold a stopwatch and tell us how fast your machine boots off the SATA disk :)