Can I install WIndows from SATA DVD drive?

[xtal01]

I am planning to put together a new computer.

I was going to purchase a SATA dvd drive but I keep hearing stories about not being able to install Windows XP off the DVD because the drive won't be recongized. Some people are saying I will need at least one IDE optical drive to install windowns?

Is this true????

Thanks .... Mike

 

[yipsl]

It's probably similar to the situation where some motherboard bios require you to load a third party driver to install XP to a SATA hard drive -- even if you're installing from an IDE drive. The issue lies with the SATA drive support in the bios.

If the motherboard you buy requires you to use a diskette for a SATA hard drive install, it will probably require the same to access a SATA DVD drive at boot. I recommend an external USB floppy drive for that purpose.

Now, to install to a SATA hard drive, you load the drivers when XP requests third party drivers, but you'll probably have to boot to an old fashioned boot disk that includes the drivers to install from a SATA DVD drive.

 

[chocobocorey]

is this BIOS limitation something that manufacturers are working on? it seems pretty hassling to not be able to have a complete SATA system- hard drives and optical drives, without having to boot off a floppy or an IDE drive.

 

[yipsl]

It's all up to the manufacturer as to what level of support each board has. For example, I have an older Intel D865 motherboard with a P4 2.8 Northwood and I was able to do a clean install of Windows XP to a new SATA drive last year. On the other hand, I just gave away a cheaper ASUS X200 based board with PCIe that was a nuisance because I had to install Windows to an IDE drive. A boot disk needed to be created to install XP to a SATA drive. Since I didn't have an external diskette drive at that time, I had to install to a 40 gig IDE instead and use the 200 gig SATA as drive D:

The best way to find out how to proceed is to go to the board manufacturer's website for support FAQs, or post on their message boards. You can also ask at Tom's Hardware forums about individual boards, someone is bound to know the board you're thinking of buying.

Eventually, IDE will fall by the wayside and full SATA support will be available on all boards, but that's not the case today.

 

[SuperFly03]

The original issue with the SATA DVD drives was that the SATA chipset used was incompatible for some reason. It was literally hit or miss with the original SATA DVD drives (talking 2 years ago or more). Since the SATA spec has become integrated into the official chipset offerings, and not soley through the coupled southbridge, I think the problem has died off. I have never had a problem installing to SATA HDD, so I have no idea what your deal is yipsl, I really don't. I have been using SATA drives for about 4 years, and never have I had to install SATA drivers as long as I wasn't using RAID. Now if RAID comes into the picture, drivers are a necessity.

 

[yipsl]

I have never had a problem installing to SATA HDD, so I have no idea what your deal is yipsl, I really don't. I have been using SATA drives for about 4 years.

I wasn't using RAID either, but the ASUS P5RD1 required a diskette to install XP from an IDE DVD drive to a SATA hard drive. That's caught many people by surprise and I suspect that other boards could have other issues.

I'd assumed that there could be similar limitations with SATA DVD drives. If that's not the case, then he should have no problems, but I'd still check with the manufacturer's FAQs and message boards just to be sure.

 

[croc]

Hmm... That's a good question for which I have no answer, but now a great deal of curiosity. Seeing as how most of the newer MB's only have one ide cable, does this mean that one needs to have at least one ide cd / dvd drive to do any re-installs ?

Again, good question. Perhaps JJ or Da (sick) Ninja or Dario (Needs a shorter name) has an answer.

 

[Compulsive]

Hi Mike
As you are looking at a new machine you should be fine.
From my experience as long as the motherboard recognises the DVD drive as a drive it should allow it to be configured as a boot device and XP will be happy.
I have been using Plextor PX-760A for a couple of months and they are extremely quiet and fast + no issues with installations.
Motherboards I have used - ASUS P5WDG2-WS, ASUS M2N32 WS Professional, GigabyteGA-M59SLI-S5
Although slightly off subject if you are looking to install onto a raid device (or even just enable the RAID feature on the motherboard) you will need to create a floppy disk with the RAID driver on.
Hope it works out well for you.
Compulsive Computing

http://www.compulsivecomputing.co.uk

 

[SuperFly03]

I have never had a problem installing to SATA HDD, so I have no idea what your deal is yipsl, I really don't. I have been using SATA drives for about 4 years.

I wasn't using RAID either, but the ASUS P5RD1 required a diskette to install XP from an IDE DVD drive to a SATA hard drive. That's caught many people by surprise and I suspect that other boards could have other issues.

I'd assumed that there could be similar limitations with SATA DVD drives. If that's not the case, then he should have no problems, but I'd still check with the manufacturer's FAQs and message boards just to be sure.

Odd. I used to use the ASUS P4C800-E and also used the Abit IC7 MAX (both 865 chipset boards, and neither gave me a problem with SATA. I agree it is better to be safe than sorry, which is why i keep a Floppy drive in my closet and a PS/2 keyboard in a drawer. Worst case scenario is you order the SATA optical drive and it doesn't work and you return it (or make a diskette).

What kind of computer are you building? AMD AM2/939 or Intel 775? Specifically what chipset?

 

[yipsl]

Odd. I used to use the ASUS P4C800-E and also used the Abit IC7 MAX (both 865 chipset boards, and neither gave me a problem with SATA. I agree it is better to be safe than sorry, which is why i keep a Floppy drive in my closet and a PS/2 keyboard in a drawer. Worst case scenario is you order the SATA optical drive and it doesn't work and you return it (or make a diskette).

The way I should have explained my thoughts on his question about installing XP from a SATA optical drive is that there probably won't be a problem, but he should check the board before he buys to make sure. Even good companies put out some budget boards that cut corners, which is why I gave my example of the ASUS board with the ATI northbridge and the ULI southbridge.

I didn't expect problems from an ASUS board either. That's why, for the months I used it, I had to install XP to a 40 gig IDE and use the SATA as the second drive. The bios recognized the SATA drive, it just would not allow it to be set as the boot device without drivers being installed when Windows asked for third party SCSI or RAID drivers.

I've been thinking of SATA DVD myself, but I'll make darn sure a future board allows booting from a SATA optical drive, I won't take it for granted just because the board lists 4 SATA and supports RAID 0 or 1.

I wish I'd found this article at Neoseeker before I bought the board last July. As is, I gave it away this Christmas to a friend who has only IDE, so he'll be okay.

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/asus_p5rd1-v/4.html

Note #2: I was also unable to get Windows installed on our usual Western Digital 120 GB SATA hard drive. Neither the SATA driver disk image provided on the CD, nor anything downloaded off ASUS’ site worked – I would press F6 during the Windows XP setup process, it would ask me for a driver disk, it would find the txtsetup.oem file and list the appropriate drivers, and it would even load the drivers. When it came time to copying the drivers over to the hard drive, the setup process complained that it was unable to find the driver files. I tried three different floppy disks with two different floppy drives. I even made a custom XP installation CD with the SATA drivers integrated into the setup – no dice. I resorted to using a Western Digital 120 GB IDE hard drive as the system drive, and then later installed the WD SATA hard drive for HDTach testing.

Maybe I just got the one ATI chipset board by ASUS that had that problem? I'm looking forward to the RS690 "T" model arriving with all the features, and I want to use a SATA drive for that, but I'll make sure first. This time around, it will be a newer ATI southbridge, so I hope the issues are taken care of. I was planning on getting ASUS's board when it arrives in February.

 

[SuperFly03]

Well said. I never suspected you were lying, but that fact does surprise me. Good luck on your next board.... avoid ASUS like I do

 

[NewbieTechGodII]

What you heard was probably true some time ago, but not any more. I built a system for my wife over a year ago (the MB is an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium). I used two Plextor PX-716SA SATA DVD drives and a WD 400GB SATA hard drive. The installation of everything went perfectly.

I remember when USB was first coming out and how Windows had a bitch of a time recognizing it. I don't remember which version of Windows was fully USB aware, but I think it might have been XP SP1; otherwise, drivers were needed for everything.

Bottom line is that any motherboard made in the past year or two should work.

Good luck!

 

[sunangel]

Avoid Asus? You must be one of those guys/gals that avoids Sony products also because of fanboyism?

DVD optical drives? I, myself, have not made the switch. I've thougt about it. The only benefit I see for SATA DVD drives are that you can burn many disks concurrently. In a machine I had a while back I bought four NECs (this was back when ripping dvds from netflix was all the rage) and was trying to burn four dvds at the same time. It was hit or miss on the master/slave IDE channels. Sometimes the burns would come out alright, most of time they didn't. After that experience my fad with ripping dvds fadded away. But since SATA are on their own channels, in theory (and maybe in actual practice) this should work fine. The south bridge on the 965 I believe moves 10gbs. This should be ample to run 4 burners at 4x and still have enough bandwidth to surf the web or run 1 download.

If your buying SATA just for cable management, may I suggest also consider a single IDE round cable.

 

[NewbieTechGodII]

Avoid Asus? You must be one of those guys/gals that avoids Sony products also because of fanboyism?

Personally, I am finished with Sony anything!

First it was their dirty little shit tricks with putting rootkits in their CDs, now it's their piss-poor mini-DV tapes. I have 6 tapes: 4 Sony, 2 Radio Shack. All 4 Sony tapes have the audio fucked up and now the taping of the births of my two children, their 1st christmas', and birthday's are fucked up. At first I thought it was the recorder, but after purchasing a new RS tape, I discover the recorder is fine.

Fuck Sony!

 

[SuperFly03]

Avoid Asus? You must be one of those guys/gals that avoids Sony products also because of fanboyism?

I don't buy ASUS because their last board I used wasn't the greatest and didn't do much for me. I have had a much better experience with DFI.

I don't buy Sony because their products are the worst thing on the market. There has been a general degradation in product quality over the last 10 years. I have had 4 or 5 Sony products, none have worked, all have broken. Sent in my stereo system to Sony for repair 3 times and each time it came back broken. Their media formats have failed miserably, they had rootkits, their PS3 consumes more than 2x as much power as a Xbox 360, its more complicated to program, its not a great deal better at all. There is no reason to buy Sony when there are more innovative and better executing companies.

I would make the move to SATA DVD because of the point to point nature of SATA, as opposed to the shared bus of IDE. They are neater cables, smaller, easier to deal with, harder to break (good + for me ), hot pluggable, and just as cheap as IDE.

 

[yipsl]

Well said. I never suspected you were lying, but that fact does surprise me. Good luck on your next board.... avoid ASUS like I do

That Neoseeker article was July 2005, I bought the board in July 2006. I didn't do research but trusted ASUS. My advice to everyone is to always do research on the board they're getting, unless they want to get a newly released board and experiment.

 

[yipsl]

I don't buy ASUS because their last board I used wasn't the greatest and didn't do much for me. I have had a much better experience with DFI.

I don't buy Sony because their products are the worst thing on the market. There has been a general degradation in product quality over the last 10 years... their PS3 consumes more than 2x as much power as a Xbox 360, its more complicated to program, its not a great deal better at all.

I've only had one quirky ASUS board. I've also had one quirky Gigabyte budget board and had several bad ECS boards bundled with Fry's CPUs. Intel is the only company where all the boards I've owned were stable without tweaks.

The only reason I'm thinking of a PS3 in about 5 years is all the Japanese RPGs that do not make it to the PC, or the Xbox 360. As is, we only have a Playstation and an N64 for "recent" consoles.

We're finally getting a PS2 and a Gamecube right after my next PC build in February. We generally wait on consoles until there are enough JRPGs to warrant the purchase, otherwise, we do our gaming on the PC.
r

 

[SuperFly03]

Understandable. I find the console better for certain game types, i.e. racing. Some titles are just better suited to consoles, and some are better suited to PC's. Waiting on consoles rarely results in a regrettable purchase, esp when they are dirt cheap

I have 5 or 6 consoles including: genesis, n64, dreamcast, ps1, etc. They all came from ebay for less than $35-40, not too shabby in my book. Oh well, too bad for hijacking the thread.

Merry Christmas All!

 

[Guest]

I did not read thru all the replies but I just succesfully installed Win Xp x64 using a P5B-Dlx (ICH8R).

Using this burner

I am using 2 X Raptor Raid0, 1 seagate 7200.10, ione Maxtor 250 gig, and another SATA DVD reader, alll work well, using Nero 7.5. Doing some more testing in the following days

 

[danjamin]

That's exactly the motherboard and DVD burner I'm getting, so thanks for the heads up that it works

 

[Bloated]

depends on the motherboard and bios, Sata 2 probably not, Sata 1 is pretty good nowadays with windows recognition.

just in case keep a floppy drive handy you may have to install the sata drivers seperately during Windows install.

p.s. I hate floppy's and constantly get burned by my policy not to install them in computers by default...... I usually try to keep a floppy drive on the shelf in case I have to hook one up outside the case to install drivers as was the case when I setup my SATA Raid array with dual Raptors on my latest box.