General discussion

[padmala]

I recently got a five year old Sony Vaio media centre with no hard drives ,but everything seemingly intact,I bought a 500GB sata drive and put it in.I downloaded raid drivers ;put them in ,and still am no closer then when i was informed that i had no hard drive connected. All i get now is PRESS S or F3 or ENTER to continue.This win xp pro i'm trying to install.Thanks for any info.padmala

 

[Chicano]

PRESS S or F3 or ENTER to continue

That means to enter the BIOS and set it to recognize the Hard Drive, 2. force HD recognition, or 3. to disable S.M.A.R.T so the BIOS can easily recognize any hard drive. You may also need to download and install the SATA drivers, Raid is another subject but I'm wondering what you mean by putting in raid drivers?.. If you can't get past the “Press S or F3” message, that means you haven't installed the SATA drivers though it makes no difference if you havent got past the BIOS message.

So first configure the BIOS to recognize the HD… you can even configure it to recognize the HD as IDE Native to make your installation easier, the motherboard should have IDE interface so this shouldn’t be a problem. You can install the SATA drivers later from Windows XP.

And if you do have the means to install the SATA drivers at the beginning of the WXP installation, have the SATA drivers ready on a diskette, USB pendrive or a second CD/DVD Reader… so they are installed at the beginning of the Windows XP installation when prompted to supply them with F6. Also if you don’t have the necessary hardware to install the SATA drivers during the installation, you can include them on a bootable Windows XP CD with the application nLite… or as said before, you can install the SATA drivers later from Windows XP
http://www.digitgeek.com/how-to-slipstream-sata-drivers-into-xp-cd/

 

[padmala]

thanks for the reply. i downloaded the sata drivers onto diskette, F6 them,but after only got the message 'txtsetup.sif is missing' Could you specifically guide me as how to configure it to recocognize HD as IDE Native?Thanks for any input anyone.As a footnote,only my diskette is functioning so no cd.The Sonys' runs as far as i know.

 

[Chicano]

'txtsetup.sif is missing' may mean the CD reader could be missing it.. I've found that a file missing message displayed during an installation, usually means the CD Reader may be missing it, or the CD may have burning errors. If the Installation CD is original, the reader is probably missing it, if it's a bootable slipstreamed copy, it may be a CD burning error.

To guide you in enabling the IDE Native I would need to know the specific motherboard brand and model to locate the mobo manual which may include BIOS instructions. The BIOS ID code could also help to search for a BIOS manual. For now I can only tell you the setting should be under the Chipset BIOS menu, down to OnChip SATA. This is for AMIBIOS but it should be named about the same on other BIOS brands.

To get the BIOS ID code, start the computer and during the BIOS post, freeze the screen with the Pause/Break key when you see a long alphanumeric code, and copy that code,.. then search for the manual and post the code here to give you a hand with the search.

 

[Saga Lout]

If there's a setting in BIOS for AHCI, change that to IDE. Also, you might try pressing Function 6 when prompted at the start of the installation process then when that process stalls for you to put in a driver disk, just press Enter. That forces XP to look in other cabinets for the right driver and it's probable SOny's will be in there.