as I have never had a SATA drive before and heard things in the past about needing boot drivers to run the harddrive when installing XP. I'm pretty sure my motherboard has Bios boot options for SATA drives but was just wanting to check if it's going to be hassle to install windows on the drive. Rig specifications in signature.
If your XP install disk includes SP2 you shouldn't have a problem. I tried installing a vintage copy of XP HOME (circa 2001, no SP2) on a SATA drive; and the install did not recognize the disk controller. Since the machine did not have a floppy drive, I couldn't use the "F6" technique to supply the necessary drivers.
I then ran across an entry in some forum (can't remember where exactly) that directed me to this site:
ON-CHIPSET SATA controllers don't need a driver at the F6 prompt so long as you disable RAID mode and use ATA mode for the SATA controller. Doing so should also cause your drive to show up in main BIOS.
I've got one of those slipstreamed XP Pro SP2 install discs from April this year so that should probably work. I'm hoping that getting a SATA harddrive will stop my pc taking ages to load up and accessing my harddrive like mad when it does. Plus it's been around a year and a half since the last one so we're due a reinstall I reckon.
