Successful XP install on new SATA hdd (long)

[Theinkman]

This may be a little lengthy, but it may help others when installing a SATA hdd. I have an older system, running a P3 1.0Ghz and an Intel 815EEA board. I recently installed a WD Raptor 37GB SATA drive, and kept the old WD 40GB IDE drive. My goal was to install XP Home on the SATA and use the IDE drive for storage, etc. I understand a lot of people have had some issues installing SATA drives, and I did a lot of reading and posting on this subject. My install went pretty smoothly, so I thought maybe others could learn something from my experience.

Since my board does not have native SATA support, I purchased a SI1G 3112 controller card. I installed this (+drivers) first to make sure it would be recognized and would function properly. Then I installed the new SATA drive. I partitioned and formatted the drive, even though I would be reformatting during the install of XP. To get ready for the new install, I slipstreamed SP2 onto (into) my original XP CD. When I got ready to install, I disconnected the old IDE drive. With the drivers for the controller card on a floppy, I started the install.

During the install, when the message “Press F6 to load drivers” came up, I put the floppy with the correct drivers in, loaded it, and the install continued. Ran into some issues when the text portion of the install ended. The message came up saying “Press any key to boot from the CD.” I did not do this, rather I just let the install continue. Message came up “A: No system disk or disk installed” or something to that effect. A: is the floppy drive; I had no idea where this was going. Restarted the installation several times-same message kept coming up. So I thought I would change the boot sequence in the BIOS. It was set to boot from: 1. CD 2. Floppy 3. IDE-HDD. Apparently the SATA drive was not recognized as an IDE drive. I do not have the option of booting from a SCSI device in my BIOS, so I was kind of stuck. My only other options were ARMD-HDD and Option ROM. I tried the Option ROM boot option, and from there everything went fine.

I have been running XP on the SATA hdd for a week now, and am really happy with the way the system is running. The biggest problems I have had are with software installations, and I wonder if some of this is not due to SP2. The most troublesome issues were with Norton Personal Firewall, Norton System Works, and InCD (Nero CD-RW app). The InCD version I had needed to be removed and replaced with v4.3.05-after I did this, it worked like a champ. Also had to install a new reader so as to be able to read disks created with InCD. The issues with the Norton products have mostly settled down, but am still trying to get these totally ironed out.

After running for a week, I finally re-connected the old IDE drive to the system. I expected problems, and was pleasantly surprised when there were none. I deleted the partition, reformatted and partitioned, and am having no problems whatsoever with it. I left the jumpers on this drive in the master position, and apparently this is working. I want to thank all those on the forum who gave me advice on how to get this whole process working. Would have been a lot more difficult without it.

[mrmister1]

The reason you ran into the problem with the boot disk is probably because you left the floppy in the floppy drive.

[Theinkman]

I had taken the floppy out-the BIOS did not recognize the SATA drive as an IDE-HDD. As soon as this message appeared, I checked to make sure I had taken the floppy out, and I had. I tried to install several times, getting this message each time, even though there was no floppy in the drive. Because of the boot sequence in the BIOS (CD, floppy, IDE hdd), it did not find anything it could boot from until I changed the BIOS to boot from "Option ROM."

[Theinkman]

Something else I wanted to add to my original post. I had gotten advice from a number of people and web sites about subsitituting some files into XP after installing which would allow me to avoid having to reactivate Windows. My CD is legal-I just didn't want to have to deal with reactivating. So, I copied the wpa.bak and wpa.dbl files from my original install, and put them on a floppy. After I had reinstalled XP, I changed the file name of the wpa.dbl to wpa.dbl1 and pasted the wpa.dbl and wpa.bak files into the Windows system32 file. Didn't make any difference-I still got the constantly flashing message telling me I had so many days to activate Windows. Finally, I just called MS and went through the activation process over the phone. It wasn't as bad as some made it out to be. Took less than five minutes.