Installing SATA drivers

[TRDCorolla1]

This may sound like a simple question, but it seems like most SATA drivers come in CDs now instead of on a single floppy disk.

Now I have a Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 nForce4 PCIe motherboard that has SATA support. I've been reading elsewhere that SATA hard drive install is a pain to install as far as Windows recognizing it.

The SATA driver that comes with the motherboard is on a CD along with other motherboard utilities, Direct X 9.0c, etc. If I were to install Windows XP on a CD-ROM and it is asking me to install third party driver (in this case my SATA drivers and press F6), do I put that motherboard utility CD in my other CD-ROM?

Or do I put the SATA driver CD that came with my SATA hard drive in the second CD-ROM?

 

[Trifid]

I think that the sata driver can only be installed using a floppy disk.

 

[eipeks]

You have to download the SATA drivers from your MoBo's website and put them on a floppy.

When installing windows it will ask you to hit F6 to install 3rd party drivers and access the floppy drive for the driver.

 

[madfats3]

My SATA was plug and play.I never installed any driver when I reinstalled XP.Why wouldnt XP have a generic driver for it?And further more SATA is bootable just like ATA is, no different.

 

[TRDCorolla1]

I have the original Windows XP when it first came out on retail without the SP1 included so it may not have what it takes to recognize SATA which is too bad. I've tried to install a SATA drive once, with no success so I quit on it and got an IDE drive instead. Now, I'm determined to make this work. It has got to work this time no matter what.

So it has to be on floppy? I wonder why GIgabyte gave me a CD that has the SATA drivers on it instead of a floppy? Can I go into BIOS and change the boot order so it will detect my other CD drive with the driver CD in it? ANother thing, I went to www.giga-byte.com and they only have the Serial RAID driver available for download, but I don't plan on going RAID. Will that help still on installing the basic SATA drivers? I guess my motherboard uses the Silicon Image SATA driver 3114 (built in SATA Controller to mobo). The other driver download is a basic SATA driver but it's for the 64-bit Windows XP, so I know that's not for me. There's one for Linux too, but that's another story.

Edit: Ok, I just downloaded a new version SATA RAID Driver Revision 5, but it's in a .exe format. If I were to copy this onto a floppy and put it in the computer, would the computer recognize it even though Windows is in the middle of installation (after I press F6 and insert the floppy with the .exe file on it)?

 

[eipeks]

My SATA was plug and play.I never installed any driver when I reinstalled XP.Why wouldnt XP have a generic driver for it?And further more SATA is bootable just like ATA is, no different.

I dont think SATA is plug and play. Every SATA HDD I have installed to run as a primary boot drive (6 to be exact) has needed a floppy to install the drivers for a clean install of windows.

However, my own PC has a ATA as the boot HDD, and once I install windows on it, Windows will detect my SATA no problem. SATA, as far as I know, is not bootable on a formatted system.

 

[eipeks]

Edit: Ok, I just downloaded a new version SATA RAID Driver Revision 5, but it's in a .exe format. If I were to copy this onto a floppy and put it in the computer, would the computer recognize it even though Windows is in the middle of installation (after I press F6 and insert the floppy with the .exe file on it)?

No, do not put the .exe on a floppy. It is most likely a program to setup the drivers on your a:\ or a self extracting zip which you can extract onto the a:\
Just run the .exe and it will extract the files needed onto a floppy.

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Great, thanks for the heads up. I"m doing it right now to see what happens.

There's got to be a way to make SATA bootable by itself. What a joke of a technology, because it's not perfected. You would think if the motherboard had SATA support, then there would be no problem at all. Just go into BIOS and change boot order to SATA drive instead of IDE and that's it. I feel the motherboard should have some basic driver burned into ROM or something to initiate a successful Windows install using the SATA. Then, once Windows XP is installed, you pop in the SATA CD driver (what I have) and get that going.

 

[eipeks]

yes it is kinda dumb. I bought my SATA when they hit the store shelves and was thrown for a loop when i wanted to install windows on it and couldnt...well, I could if I actually had a floppy drive, but I didnt put one in when I built my computer. (who'da thunk I needed a floppy drive in todays world of flash drives and bootable CD roms.)


Perhaps new mobo's have this default sata driver built in, perhaps why Mad's is plug and play.

 

[TRDCorolla1]

I ran the exe file and no success. I got an error message saying "Get Install Key fail!!" then "INstall driver fail".

I'm using my other computer so that may be the cause. It doesn't recognize the motherboard because this PC I"m using now has an MSI nforce2 board on it.

This is very wierd. I wonder if Asus has their SATA drivers on a floppy to F6 from. This GIgabyte is giving me headaches.