Hi all a discussion has just occured at work between me and my collegue he says he needs floppy disk to install his controller drivers at the F6 screen on windows XP install and theres no other way to get it working. But i refuse to believe that and know there is ways to do it, although i havent done this myself in the past. He has an Abit motherboard my guess would be an nforce 3 board not sure of the model number. So any help of being able to install windows onto SATA drives without the use of a floppy drive at all would be apptreciated.
Depends on the option chosen in the BIOS. If you select "IDE" under SATA options it will emulate an IDE devise and you won't need drivers, but if you select "RAID" or "ACHI" then you will require drivers. This is only the case for southbridge connected SATA ports though, since 3rd party chipsets connected to the PCI/PCIe bus will require drivers regardless.
I would vote for the slipstream option. I've had to reinstall XP on my HTPC about 4 times now and having to dismantle the whole case to get a floppy drive connected each time is a pain! My NF2 mobos have the ever popular Sil3112/3114 SATA chipset. WinXP for some insane reason has about 50 different SCSI and IDE controller drivers that it loads as part of the install process, but I don't recognize a single one of them as being actual consumer level chipsets. Way to go M$! I've even had floppies get corrupted in the process of installing the drivers and had to go to the store and buy another box of floppies. Ugh! So ya, go for the slipstream approach.
This confused the heck out of me when I built my E6600, went for the '"IDE" under SATA option in the end as I couldn't figure out which driver to choose from the long list Gigabtye provided and the one they mentions in the manual was on the list. But what is the best option for a single SATA HDD - IDE, RAID or ACHI?
Depends upon the controller & which version of XP media he is installing from whether he needs to add drivers from F6 or not but if he says that there is no other way to do it than with a floppy then he's wrong. As stated above you can slipstream the drivers onto a WinXP install disc.
wait now I am cunfused. I dont have to do anything and I have an asus P4 800 se mother board and I dont have to intall drivers. I just plug the sata drive and turn ont he pc and it says detected sata drive on id 0 and then the windows xp set screen shows up and run everything smoothly. or is this issue for old motherboards?
Windows XP SP2 does include SATA support for some chipsets, but not all like your friends. I would recommend the slipstream option, then he will also always have a windows disc made just for that PC next time reloading comes around. nLite can be used to do other cool options for windows installation too.
