reformating a hard drive

I have an odd situation. I have a hard drive with windows installed but I need to wipe it to install the sata drivers because they need to be installed with windows. But I cant see my hard drive because the motherboard only has one IDE slot and I need that for my dvd-rom drive. Is there any way to wipe a drive using a floppy?

 

I'm sorry I don't understand your question. Are you reinstalling windows to the same drive you have now, what drives do you own, and what interfaces do they use?

 

WINXP does not support SATA hard drives, however you can go to the manufactures website download the drives, put them on a floppy and during the xp installtion put the floppy in when prompted and the drivers will load allowing you to install

OR

go into your bios before the installtion and disable
Native SATA Support
not all bios'S have this option.... but if you are able to disable it then you can install xp without the SATA driver

(note: once the xp installtion is done however you must install the SATA drivers to obtain sata disc speeds and performance, otherwise it will act like a IDE drive instead)


if your computer does not have a floppy drive or you would prefer not to use it then you can always slipstream the drivers into your xp disc

to do this you use software called Nlite
http://www.nliteos.com/

guide
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/wind...d-disk-drives-during-windows-xp-installation/

you can also slipstream drivers for other components, service packs, remove features and such other thing! its really very simple and works GREAT!!!

so anyway these are your options!

best of luck!
-tripplite

 

Hmm I never knew that, I've always installed XP onto S-ATA hard drives without issue...

 

really? i've done it quite a few times and without a custom made disc with drivers the installtion would never gone through.....and i was using both the 32-bit and 64-bit OS so i dont think it makes a difference.......

(psssst.... sammy if you pirated Xp then it most likely has sata drivers slipstreamed in already along with updates and such)

-tripplite

 

whether legitimate or otherwise, Home or Pro, VLK or not, it seems to make no difference. My S-ATA drives have always been detected at startup. However, I've always used recent chipsets - the only ones I've had to install XP on when using S-ATA hard drives are the nForce 4SLI, the Radeon Xpress 200, nForce 650i, Intel P35 and Intel X38. When I installed XP with my old VIA KT600 board it was to IDE drives, always - I indeed didn't spot the S-ATA hard disks in the install but they were setup using RAID.

 

Windows XP didn't initially come with SATA support. I've never used a floppy for installing XP on an SATA drive, and that's a lot of drives. In fact I haven't owned a floppy since 2001.

1. set the bios to make it boot from the cd rom only, disable all other drives. Windows will still detect you hard drive and install to it even disabled.
2. Place Xp in CD rom, save and exit bios.

As your system boots up you will be asked if you'd like to boot from CD Rom, hit enter. You should know what to do from here.

This should be enough to get you started

 

What are you guys talking about? There aren't drivers for hard disks, the drivers you are loading are for the controller. That's why you don't have support for those drives trippy - the controller driver isn't included on XP. And what the hell is this guy trying to do, I don't really understand this - LOL? I think XP supports using a USB key to load the driver, no?

 

So have I, Sam. I have not experienced a problem with XP finding the SATA drive to install the OS.

 

I spoke only of support, and if the OP follows my directions exactly there is a good chance that his issues will be resolved.

 

Yea, I wrote my comment as you were doing yours. I was really referring to Sam and Trippy.

 

Just surfing for the hell of it I found this website and I have no idea why they are recommending this, my instructions have worked 100% of the time without all this hoop jumping.

http://www.neoseeker.com/Hardware/faqs/kb/15,24.html

 

XP does not have SATA support.... many many people with OEM computers who attempt to do a reinstall on there sata drive get the

"Setup did not find any hard disk drives"
error
now if they have a XP disc from the manufacture then its gonna have the SATA drivers no doubt....i hope LOL

but i guess since most of you guys out there are working with custom rigs and not OEM machines you dont experience these issues with your motherboards....

sorry buddy but not quite as universal as you might think!!!
i had to do a fresh install of xp on a friends laptop the other day and the only way it booted off the CD was if all the other entries were deleted from the list (hard disc and such), even so the computer still needed the SATA drivers there wasn't any other way around it!

and unfortunately disabling Native SATA Support was not listed in his bios


-tripplite

 

WOW, who's using SFF SATA drives in laptops? Those things are way too pricey and I don't see any reason to use them on a laptop.

 

You what? Whenever I've looked S-ATA 2.5" drives have been no more expensive than their IDE counterparts, just like with 3.5" drives...

 

I did a quick Google search and everything I saw ranged from 150-400 dollars or more. What would be the reason for using them other then faster data i/o? It's just a laptop, not a server or PC. I could understand using them on servers where you get a lot of traffic running on the disks.

 

Well all the laptops I've seen in the past two years have used S-ATA hard drives - it's modern technology, what can I say?

2.5" IDE hard drives at Scan UK start at £30.16 for a 40GB and are around the £40 mark for 120GB drives.
2.5" SATA hard drives from the same store start at £29.96 for a 40GB and are around £33 for 120GB, 250GB drives are available for less than £60.

lrn2google lol!

 

Ok, those were prices from the UK. I'm here in the states and everything I saw was pretty pricey. And what kind of drives where those? Probably a crappy brand. Like I said before, there would be no reason to use a "SATA" drive in a laptop unless you were doing some serious work on it that required the drive, like on a server. But if you can find a SFF SATA drive there, that is worth a shit, more power to you - throw it in there!

**update**

Just checked newegg and the cheapest SFF SATA drive I could find was 52 dollars - USD.