Re: No SATA support in Recovery Console and no floppy. BSOD loop a

broozm wrote:
Slightly off topic - but in the long run, what methods are Operating Systems going to offer to load drivers at the F6 point? I'm guessing usb?

I ask, because, in this case I will have to find a floppy to plug in, but if the mobo doesn't have a plug i'm sol.

I will try once more along this tack - just so I get some closure on this!

"Paul" wrote:


You can use NLite from nliteos.com , to slipstream a driver into an installer
CD. NLite reads your installer CD, and makes as its output, an ISO9660 file.
Using a CD burner, you can burn a new installer CD (a program like Nero can
handle an ISO9660). Since the download I found, is an INF type driver,
it should work with NLite. (NLite doesn't like other kinds of driver installers,
like an Installshield - it is just looking for INF style ones.)

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Install-Windows-XP-On-SATA-Without-a-Floppy-F6-47807.shtml

http://www.nliteos.com/guide/part1.html

*******

You could try plugging in a USB floppy, but I haven't tested that. I have
experimented with my USB floppy, and to make it the "A:\" drive, I have
to go into the BIOS and disable the existing floppy. The thing is,
Super I/O chips still have a floppy interface in the hardware. If a
Dell/HP/Acer/Gateway chooses to have a BIOS without customization settings,
then they should make sure the Super I/O floppy is disabled, so it won't
accidentally be detected as an operating floppy drive.

Once I took care of that, my USB floppy was treated as A:\.

But I haven't actually tried to do an install, pressing F6 and using
a driver from there. I needed the USB floppy for some other reason/experiment,
and it had to be A: for the experiment to work.

The NLite option might be a better bet.

*******

Another thing to note - you can actually do an installation without a CD
drive. The copy of WinXP installed on my computer, was done with a hard
drive install. What you do, is set up two FAT32 partitions on the disk. The
second smaller partition (D:), holds the contents of the CD. C: is empty.
The tricky part, is you need an MSDOS boot disk of some sort, to kick off
the install. The reason for the FAT32, is so MSDOS can see both C: and D:.
Once the system boots into DOS, you go to C:\i386 and run the winnt.exe file.

So in principle, there might be some way to throw a driver into the
set of 5000 files in the i386 folder, and install from DOS. I bet
you could even use NLite, to prepare an ISO9660, then copy all the
files from the ISO9660 into the D: drive, and do a hard drive install.

There is no advantage to the hard drive install method. It doesn't
shave as much time off the install as you might think. And it took
me an entire day, to build an MSDOS boot disk that worked well (I had
a hardware conflict in the address space). Still, it's an option if
you can't or won't be doing an install from an actual CD drive.

If you're hacking your own MSDOS boot disk, this reference is handy.
I needed this several times.

http://www.vfrazee.com/ms-dos/6.22/help/

More fun with DOS, in this example.

http://www.infocellar.com/cd/boot-cd.htm

I think I've even booted my MSDOS image, from a USB stick. I tried
the HP formatter, and that didn't work right. I eventually just
copied my good 1.44MB floppy, sector by sector, to the USB flash,
using "dd" in Linux, and the damn thing booted. I still don't understand
why that worked. But if I was stuck without a floppy drive, I could
go back to my 1GB USB stick, "dd" over my MSDOS stuff, and it would
work on my current motherboard. When done that way (a raw mode copy),
the USB stick even claims to be 1.44MB in size (even though it is
physically using 0.2% of the available storage space).

These are the kinds of things you try, when you have days to waste :-)

Paul
.

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