Sata driver for xp

Stop playing with jumpers!

On SATA hard drives there is NO Master and NO Slave. You do NOT set jumpers for any of that! Some SATA hard drives DO have jumpers on pins, but they are for different purposes entirely. ONE jumper on WD drives is used to force a SATA II drive to slow down to original SATA speeds. But any other jumper setting should NOT be changed unless you know what you're doing. I know that there is one jumper setting you can make that completely disables the drive! So, go to the WD website and find out exactly what jumper settings you should have, and restore that.

Now, when you go to install Win XP, you have two options on how to use a SATA drive. Win XP does not know how to use that device. Your first and simplest option is to use a setting in BIOS Setup for the SATA port. Set its mode to IDE (or PATA) Emulation, and the mobo will fool Win XP into thinking it has a plain old IDE drive it understands fully, and it all works. In this method you lose a few of the advantages of the new SATA system, but many people don't care about that.

The other option is to install proper SATA or AHCI drivers into Win XP early in its Install routine. To do this you must have a floppy drive in the system, and the required driver(s) already on a floppy diskette. To find the driver, read the manual of your mobo and find the CD that came with it. It should tell you exactly how to prepare the floppy disk with the drivers needed. Then when you start the Win XP Install process, very early you will see a screen telling you to hit the "F6" key of you want to install external drivers. If you don't do anything here, the screen will time out and proceed. But if you hit F6 you can follow instructions to install those driver(s) from the diskette, then proceed with the XP Install. Just NOTE before you do that: the driver(s) available may be called SATA or AHCI. Whatever they are, make sure that you go into the BIOS Setup screens before the Install and set the SATA port mode to match the driver you have on the floppy disk.