Ive recently come into a bit of spare cash (not a common thing being a third year student). I decided that some of it should be spent on shiney new technology, because it would be rude not too really. Had a look at my beast and decided what i really need most is a new larger HDD. I've narrowed it down to two choices really: 1) the samsung F1 1TB http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143288 2) The WD 640GB http://www.ebuyer.com/product/144339 Ive heard that the WD has the better performance as its only on the two platters but i must say the round 1TB of the samsung drive appeals to me
Get 2x640Gb drives? Maybe consider getting F1s. On price per Gb, the 640Gb is cheapest, and two drives will be faster than one anyway (if you can afford it) Just my 2 cents
Buying a Samsung hard drive is like sleeping with a prostitute... you may not be weary about it at first, but it's only a matter a time until you horribly regret your decision
Unfortunately I dont have the funds for two of them but im going with the WD. Im planning on partitioning it so i can reinstall windows without having to fanny about moving my media files. I was thinking about a 160GB partition for XP and apps, with media and possibly games in the remaining space. Think that'll be big enough?
Well if i take away the music and vids ive got about 100GB of used space still on my drive, admittedly that is with games as well. i'll see when I do it
Ok the drive arrived today and i tried to install my copy of XP but whan it restarts after the initial format/install it says there's an error with the opperating system. As far as i can tell its one of two things: 1) i need to use a jumper (which i dont have) to force the drive to SATA1 in order for it to communicate with my old asus a8n-sli mobo 2) i need to install a SATA driver before the install starts (but i didnt have to do this for my old SATA maxtor) Any help or suggestions will be welcomed with open arms
XP always required the SATA drivers to be installed during the installation process, so best find out a spare floppy and turn it into a driver disc and hit F6!
I've never needed to do that with my old drive though. That said i think its one of the early drives which werent natively SATA and it could just be an ide drive in a frock. However if that is the case then im up a creek without an imprtant piece of equipment, in this case a floopy drive. Is there any way of using a USB stick?
not that i have heard, the main reason for the FDD to still exists because of XP sata drivers. If your a pro, you slip stream the drivers into a custom XP disc, but thats only useful after the first install.
i think ive found a way of creating a bootable usb drive. all i need now is the sata driver which i cant seem to find for love nor money. All the asus site gives is a tool to put an image on a floppy all i need is the actual driver file which i can bosh on there so i can hit F6
Aren't you talking about FDDs existing for *RAID* drivers? I've not had to install separate drivers in XP for a single SATA drive. As far as the Samsung F1 1TB drive, my roommate has one with an RMA to send back. It's a dead drive and only the 32Gb cache is detected. Don't know if that's common with the Samsung terabyte drives, but the smaller ones are supposed to be quiet, fast and run well.
I think this is a likely case of an SATA-v2.0 drive with an SATA 1.0 controller. You probably need a jumper to force it into SATA-1 mode temporarily.
Krikkit, if you're talking about the Samsung, nope... tried it on two different motherboards, newish models with 2.0 controllers. The Samsung diagnostics said it bombed too. But as I said, relevent to the thread, I don't think if this is a common problem or not with Samsungs. Just my only experience with one.
unless later revisions of XP i.e SP2 onwards, its always been down the user to install the drivers from a medium like a floppy disc, during the installion. This is a clean install, not an upgrade via windows. Back when XP was created, SATA was fairly new tech for the consumer market and lots of different RAID controller chips available so microsoft took the easy route and made its a consumers issue to install, otherwise the XP CD would have had to have been a DVD to store all the drivers! In the past i have slipstreamed drivers onto a disc image using nlite and burn't new installion disc's with other drivers and even apps to be installed during the XP install. Its very handy, but i soon found that my hardware was chaning faster than my reinstalls of XP i i just stopped with the hassle of creating my own disc's. Nlite is handy for network admin, who cant be arsed to image a drive. lol!
The A8N doesn't need drivers for SATA support from the onboard controller, they're passed through in the same way as normal PATA drives on mobo's from around then, and even before that. It would need drivers for the integrated extra controller though, which could be the problem here. Scirocco - my post was @ the OP, not you. Squallers - Which ports are you using this drive on? Red or Black? It should say in the mobo which ones are for the Silicon Image SATA RAID controller.
You might try to repair your Windows installation from the Windows CD. It will keep all your software and settings as they were. I recently did that for a colleague when upgrading the motherboard of their pc. Windows BSODed right after boot, but repairing the Windows installation fixed that. Also, have you set SATA to AHCI/RAID or Legacy? Try booting with the SATA option set to Legacy. Lastly, I don't think Windows XP allows access to USB drives during installation whether they're made bootable or not. So for the driver disk solution you'd need a floppy disk drive, no matter what.
i tried the jumer thingy but that didnt work either so im assuming its the driver issue. Ive got my hands on a floppy drive (it was the only one they had in the local computer store. kirkkit - ive only got 4 ports, all of which are black. My mobo's the bog standard a8n-sli so its only got one controller as far as im aware azreal - i'll try that too, thanks Here we go then
