Do i need special drivers to install on an SATA drive?

Nope, 7'll do it.

well thats a bit of good news. thanks! bad news is i dont have windows 7. haha. only xp pro.

 

Slipstream Service Pack 3 to your XP Installation and it should see pretty much all SATA drives.

get 7 and be done with it

3 Options

1. Set sata operation mode to IDE in the bios. This will let windows use native IDE drivers. You loose some features such as NCQ and Hot swap. For some, this is worth the hassle free install. There is NOT a big performance hit for most systems with this option.

2. Dust off an old floppy drive and get the SATA/AHCI/RAID driver copied to it. Many motherboard makers call this the F6 disk because when windows is loading it will tell you at the bottom to hit F6 to load 3rd party driver. Hitting F6 here lets you get the driver off the disc. Some board allow a USB stick to emulate a floppy drive. This may work in your case as well.

3. Slipsteam not just the latest service pack but also the drivers needed with a program like nLite. When i last used this, it did NOT work with MCE, but is reported to work well with XP Pro.

http://www.nliteos.com/

I guess a last option would be windows 7. Since Vista windows can now load drivers for SATA/SCSI controllers off a flash drive. I have yet to need to since it seems to support many drivers internally already.

EDITED TYPO! Win7 DOES "NOW"(Oppsy i had does "NOT") allow driver loading from USB flash drives.

I have not seen the need of ACHI drivers with 7, they are all on the disk, I did do some slipastreaming with XP, but but not 7

If in doubt when reinstalling XP, press the Function 6 key when prompted to do so even if you haven't got slipstreamed drivers or a floppy disk. Later, you'll be prompted to pop in that floppy or to hit Enter and I find hitting Enter makes XP look in more cabinets because it invariably finds the right driver without the need for a disk. If you don't press the F6 key at the beginning, it opresses on assuming PATA or no special drivers.