Only want one Hard Drive

No you can just use one hard drive. RAID is for multiple hard drives and doesn't affect anything about single hard drives. All you need to do is plug the drive in and reinstall your OS and any applications you had before.

Hi,

So, I 'CAN' only run one harddrive?

I wondered about that, but I couldn't find anything in the manual. They only spoke of Raid and multiple hard drives. I guess they assumed everyone knows this already.  

I guess I'll still have to deal with the XP driver on the floppy?

This is great. I'll be happy once I see the OS on the screen.  

Thanks a lot for the great info!

aaaheavy

If you plan to install XP fresh onto your new SATA drive, you most certainly can do the AHCI driver installation from floppy so that the SATA drive can use AHCI mode. (On an older mobo there just might not be an AHCI option, they might call it just Native SATA.)

The other option, if it is in your mobo's BIOS, is to have the SATA drive pretend it is an IDE drive. Within BIOS Setup go to where the SATA ports are managed and make sure the SATA port(s) are Enabled. Look very close to there for a place to set the port mode. Options usually are IDE (or PATA) Emulation, Native SATA, AHCI, or RAID. If you set Native SATA or AHCI, you will have to load a driver from floppy in the Win XP Install process. But choose the IDE (or PATA) Emulation option and the BIOS will fool Windows into thinking the drive is only an IDE unit it fully understands, and no driver needs to be installed - it just works! Doing this means you do miss out on a few advanced features of AHCI devices, but if you don't care about this, this is a way to avoid the driver install from floppy step.

Hi,
Thanks for the nice information. I have noted it and will refer to it the next time I install a SATA.

Unfortunately that HDD was bad and refused to be read by the BIOS. I am now waiting for a new one from WD.
Many Thanks, aaaheavy