SATA RAID driver installation on XP - misconception

[techland]

Hi Everyone:

There seems to be this misconception that just because you have XP SP2 you don't need the RAID (SATA) drivers on a floppy disk. Nothing can be further from the truth. I work with different motherboards all the time and I WISH the MB manufacturers would FINALLY get this working correctly!

It depends on the motherboard (or RAID card) that you are using - if the generic Windows driver works, then you will not need to use a floppy disk. If not, then you STILL need the floppy disk . You still need to jumper WD JD80G SATA drives pins 5 and 6 otherwise the Windows installation will NEVER find the drive. To make matters worse, now most drives that are sold are SATA II, and you will have to jumper the drive to install on a 150 MB/S bus to get it to work.

So far I have found one (1) AM2 motherboard that supports SATA properly and doesn't need the floppy disk: the ASUS M2N-E. Aside from that, I have used ASUS (even the M2N-SLI Deluxe) and MSI boards and found none of them to offer SATA support without a floppy. ****! I still have to install floppy disk drives on systems . Strange, because my personal ASUS K8V SE Deluxe DOES support SATA w/out floppy drivers, and that was from almost 2 years ago!

This situation is also a PIA because diagnostics with NTFS boot disks (like Barts PE) also don't work unless the MB supports the SATA without the floppy, or you have to install the driver from a script, or push that blasted F6 button.

Any other comments from techs regarding motherboard support for SATA would be welcomed

Dave

[Sonic]

Many chipsets works like a standard IDE controler even the SATA controller.

But few others needs drivers (like ALi/ULi , some Intel ) to be detected by Windows, so you need to integrate drivers to your CD / BartPE / WinPE or use F6 floppy.

[RJARRRPCGP]

If Windows never finds the HDD, then it probably is because the BIOS failed to detect the HDD.

[eyeball]

for software to interact with any hardware device drivers are needed and SATA raid is no exception. an aleternative to the floppy is to integrate the raid drivers into your windows media, either manually or using nlite

thanks

[severach]

Slipstream the SATA drivers in your next install CD and stop wasting time with a floppy or compatibility modes or worrying about what manufacturers are or aren't doing.

http://driverpacks.net/