SATA XP Install and boot

If for some un-godly reason you cant use the F6 option and you dont want to make an ISO XP boot disc using another program here is another way to get-er-done:

Run your XP on your regular IDE drive. Using either your CD or downloaded Raid/AHCI drivers install the drivers on your working XP on your IDE drive

You should see detected new hardware pop up (ofcoarse make sure your SATA is plugged in your motherboard and powered up)

You can go to your hardware list (right-click my computer, select hardware, the right-click SCSI and pick update drivers - search the CD or place you downloaded and extracted the driver folder). Just installing the driver package from the CD or download is way easier.

After the intall of raid drivers you should be able to see another drive on your My Computer window

Copy over your files from your C:windows folder from your IDE to your SATA drive (windows will detect this drive) If not go to your computer manager program under: Control Panel, Administrator tools, computer management icon. Then choose disk management and format your SATA to NTFS.

After that reboot. Set your bios to Raid as the the controller (Not AHCI)

Get your settings on the bios to boot from CD. Remove your IDE drive (just unplug the power cable)

Install windows to your SATA using the raid controller. Dont worry about the reformatting (I used quick NFTS). If your windows Boot program shows the full Storage space of your SATA HD then it is reading everything your Motherboard is reading too. Set your partitions if you like (I did - used 120GB out of 320GB to install XP). Install on the partition you want and let it run its course.

After loading XP, reboot and set your bios back to boot from Hardrive.

It will load with no problem.


My Mother board was an Asus M2A-VM with the newest bios loaded from the Asus website.

Hope this makes it easy to get up and running.

* If you have the hardware you can format your SATA to NTFS using it as an external hard drive using a USB to IDE device. And simply copy your pre-raid windows folder to the SATA drive.

Well, I guess that is a drawn-out-round-about-piece-and-patch-it-together sort of way to do something that is actually quite easy and straight forward to begin with.