How do I install sata drivers w/o floppy?

[Andretti]

I have an Alienware Area 51 laptop. It has a dvd-cd rom and no floppy. It came with a 60 gig IDE drive, but it has gotten to the point where I needed more space.

I then purchased a new SATA 200 gig drive and the appropriate cable to connect it to the mb.

All goes well as I boot up and the XP disk starts up. It asks me if I need to load any third party drivers and I hit F3 to do that. The problem is, it says that it cant load any of them since it cannot find a floppy drive connected to the computer. If I bypass selecting F3 and let it go to the initial XP setup screen, it stops and says I cannot load xp since no hard drive was found.

How on earth do I get around this? I tried a program called nLite which suggests that you can re-image the XP disk and add the required drivers, but in my search for the Hitachi Sata drivers, I can only find the "make a floppy disk" choice and even when I do that, I cannont find the proper *.ini file.


I'm pretty much stuck at this point and needing suggestions. I did try to connect a usb memory card but all xp wanted to do to it is format it. I am prolly gonna go to Best buy and purchase an external floppy drive and try it that way too, but thats my last idea and I have no clue if it will work.

Advice needed please. Thanks for anything you can suggest.

Bryan

[jas420221]

Ehh...you shouldnt need to do that. Usually thats only with a RAID setup do you need to load drivers for Windows setup. Try installing it without going into F3.

I take it you are installing Windows on this drive (which is why you are using the install disk..right?)?

[Andretti]

Ehh...you shouldnt need to do that. Usually thats only with a RAID setup do you need to load drivers for Windows setup. Try installing it without going into F3.

I take it you are installing Windows on this drive (which is why you are using the install disk..right?)?

When I do, it doesnt find the hard drive at all.

Bryan

[Xcel]

Is that in AHCI mode? Have you checked the HD is identified correctly in bios?

It should be detectable in IDE mode by windows but I don't know whether you want to use AHCI or not.
On my laptop I can install windows on my sata disk in IDE mode without additional drives but I need a floppy in AHCI mode.

[jas420221]

^^Yes^^

Make sure its ID'd properly in BIOS. Mine was plug and play really.

[Andretti]

Is that in AHCI mode? Have you checked the HD is identified correctly in bios?

It should be detectable in IDE mode by windows but I don't know whether you want to use AHCI or not.
On my laptop I can install windows on my sata disk in IDE mode without additional drives but I need a floppy in AHCI mode.

I guess I'm not familar with "AHCI" mode. I scanned the entire bios with my old hd loaded and dont see it listed anywhere. When the computer resets and starts booting up again I do see the proper listed drive size (with the old one) and when the new one is back in I do see the "Hitachi 186 GB ultra dma 5" as it boots to the initial password check.

In the bios under the boot sector, it does list the "PCI SCSI: SATA378 TX2plus D0". I'm assuming that is the hd listing, so yeah, it is there.

Bryan

[zanzabar]

u can use nlite to slipstream the driver into the disk

[Andretti]

u can use nlite to slipstream the driver into the disk

I tried that but could only find the "setup disk" for hitachi. When I searched for the right *.ini file on the disk it created, even when pointing it to the files, it couldnt find the right one.


Bryan

[BrokenWall]

There are multiple types of SATA installs to help avoid confusion.

RAID - This allows you to setup single or multiple disks in arrays, this is needed if you want to do stripping and or mirroring on multiple drives. Now a single drive can be installed in RAID mode but its kinda pointless.

ACHI - (Advanced Controller Hardware Interface) I may be wrong on the meaning but, this is great for using SATA drives to get full NCQ, Buffering support, and the best performance out of your controller and drive, this still requires a SATA driver during the install similar to a RAID install, but each disk is automattically identified as its own storage device.

IDE Mode - This is when the controller is emulating the SATA support and making the OS believe its a standard IDE device, this is has been know to loose some performance and have some stability problems with some OSes.


Some motherboards allow you to either use a USB floppy drive to install the drivers or even format a cheap 64MB thumb drive to become a bootable floppy device. For the laptops it never hurts to go out and buy a cheap $20 USB Floppy drive and leave it around the house. I have one for my Dad's laptop that I even use when setting up my desktop RAID. Hope this helps.



Yes a slipstreamed version of XP/Vista does help with drivers also.

[Andretti]

Well, I picked up the drive from Best Buy (the floppy) and it does recognize it. The disk that I downloaded from Hitachi evidently contain the proper drivers cause when I put it in the external floppy and the laptop searched it, it didnt find anything it could use....so off to find the "correct" sata drive for a hitachi.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Hopefully I can find the proper driver.

Bryan

[BrokenWall]

No you don't look for hitachi's drivers.


You need to get the drivers for your SATA Controller from Alienware, its the Controller that Windows needs to find, not the SATA Drive.

[Peakr]

Make sure HD detection is all set to auto in the bios. Also you need to format the hard drive first, sometimes windows won't see it unless it's formated. Try UBCD (http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/)

[Andretti]

Thanks for the help and suggestions. I am now in the process of updating windows.

That driver did the trick.

Thanks again.

Bryan