Quick questions

[thesupermedium]

I'm about to order the parts for my new build, and I was wondering about a few things:

I'm ordering an OEM HD and an OEM Disk Drive. Do I need to buy the SATA cables for these, or should the mother board (Retail) come with them?

When I get everything hooked up and start the boot, do I need to install drivers for the disk drive, and if so, how? It would seem difficult if you couldn't put a disk in, or instal the OS if the drive didn't work.

Sorry if these are obvious questions, I just really don't want to mess anything up, and this is my first build. Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[hunter315]

The cables come with the motherboard. You shouldnt need drivers for anything except your graphics card, and maybe your motherboard depending on if windows is able to find them online(mine was connected to the internet and did).

Good luck, there are no stupid questions before buying the parts and attempting to build, any questions then are good questions. Come back if you have any other questions.

 

[thesupermedium]

Thanks a ton dude! You have helped me with alot of questions, and I appreciate that. I have a disk with all the drivers for my GPU, so I should be okay, and even if it doesn't work with the disk, I can do without until internet works, Thanks though!

 

[hunter315]

It will run reasonable well without the drivers, just dont try to game on it without the drivers, but the basic windows drivers are sufficient for dealing with the windows desktop.

 

[thesupermedium]

Okay, I'll keep that in mind too. I'm pretty excited about this build, I've got a few combo deals, and some good brands (I know I could go cheaper, but I trust all of the brands)

 

[Paperdoc]

With Windows XP and earlier, Windows itself had one built-in driver for disk deviecs - the IDE port system - and it could use HDD's or optical drives on IDE ports in the Install process. However, it could not boot from a SATA device unless you used its install option to load the necessary driver(s) from a floppy drive (yes, only floppies were allowed in those systems). Beginning with VISTA, however, Windows also has drivers built in for SATA devices, too, so it CAN install from those.

Because this created a problem for XP installers who did not also have a floppy drive, mobo makers created an interesting alternative. If you go into the BIOS Setup screens to the section that sets up how SATA drives are used, there are options for whether the BIOS treats each SATA device as native SATA, AHCI, RAID, or IDE Emulated. The first three there require driver installation from floppy if you are installing XP or earlier. But the IDE Emulation option (often set as default) has the BIOS control the SATA port and make it appear (to Windows) as if it were simply the old standard IDE port, and XP Install is happy to see that - no extra drivers required. As I said, as of VISTA, this is not an issue.