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Trying to avoid a reformating nightmare


coolguy1541

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So I have windows xp media center and I've had it for awhile and I want to reformat it, long story short, just to iron out some bugs that have accumulated over the years (yes I've tried other fixes already). But I'm scared to death it's not going to recognize my sata HD and I don't have a diskette drive and I think I would have problems slip streaming it b/c 1. I couldn't find the drivers on the manufact. website and 2. the first dvd recovery disk is full so I'm not sure how that would work if I went ahead and slip streamed up to sp2 or something hoping it would have the drivers, but anyway.....I spent hours researching this problem and my question IS - If I made this recovery disk from my current computer and it still has the same HD in it, wouldn't it have the driver for it? B/c I was fishing around on the disk and it looks like it has a driver for my lightscribe cd burner and video card. But I just thought with all these people on the internet having this problem that they all wouldn't have been people who upgraded their hd. Anyway any help is mucho appreciated

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and my question IS ...

No matter what your question is :ph34r:, a good question is ;): can you provide EXACT data about the hardware you are using? :unsure:

It is very possible that some member can find the appropriate driver for your board SATA controller.

As well it is very possible that your board BIOS can be set into "Ide emulation mode" or equivalent and then you won't need the driver during install.

jaclaz

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I am using a compaq desktop with AMD athlon64 processor 3500 (running 32bit windows MSE SP3) with 2 gig ram the hard drive is a Western digital 250gig SATA HD - WD2500JS-60MHB1.

I did look for some of those bios changes you can make such as changing sata controller from AAHCI to ATA, and doing IDE emulation, but the only thing I saw in my BIOS that resembled any of that was something like an option that said SATA - and it just said compatible I think next to it. Hope this is info you were asking for.

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If your computer runs in IDE comptability mode, no additional drivers are needed. You only need SATA drivers if you computer is in AHCI mode. I honestly am not sure for your computer which one it is, though I'm leaning towards IDE compatibility.

Someone you could try, if you know someone who has a spare SATA hard drive they could lend you, you could unplug your hard drive and use the borrowed one to "practice" formatting your computer and find out what drivers you're missing to do so.

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I'm scared to death it's not going to recognize my sata HD

If it doesn't recognize the HDD, it won't format it either. So you don't have to be scared.

+ What exactly do you mean by "upgraded their HD" ? If only the disk has changed but the recovery DVD was made for that machine, it wil still recognize the SATA controller, and that is what you need.

Isn't there something to prevent you from running the recovery disc on multiple cpu's though?

No, the recovery disc is made for all (same sort of) machines. Depending on what XP flavour it is, you might have to register, but this is not a problem if testing for a few days.

Also if you want to be 100% safe, as suggested by jcarle, you could get a SATA HDD from eBay for almost nothing and practice your install.

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