Re: Win Xp and Sata support

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Walter R. wrote:
I would like to buy a new computer which has only Sata Hard Drives (No IDE).

Will Win XP Pro SP3 support a SATA drive as the boot drive?

Previously, when I installed Win XP on a computer with SATA drives, I had to use a floppy and F6 to make Windows see the SATA drive.

Thanks


WinXP SP3 can support SATA drives.

The BIOS will show several options for SATA ports. The first two
are supported in WinXP.

Compatible mode - SATA drive made to emulated IDE in I/O space.
Enhanced mode - SATA controller shows up in PCI space. May also
be referred to as native mode.

AHCI mode - Needs F6 and floppy with driver.
Supports hot swap for SATA (or ESATA) drives.
(Vista has support for AHCI built in, but WinXP
does not.)

RAID mode - Needs F6 and floppy with driver.

On some chipsets, if you ever plan on using RAID at some
future date, then installing the RAID driver during the
initial install is recommended. That causes the least
work later, when migrating to RAID. The motherboard documentation
may not mention this, and you may have to search elsewhere to
get more documentation.

The AHCI driver is handy, if you have plans of plugging in SATA
drives while the computer is running, and having the drive detected.
I believe hot plugging has been supported without an AHCI driver,
so there may be other options for that as well.

Compatible mode even works with Win98. But a lot of the
other hardware in the computer may give you grief. I was
lucky with my motherboard - I have a Core2 Duo and a motherboard
with VIA chipset, and Win98SE actually installs clean on my
motherboard. Only one core of the processor is recognized, but
the machine is still fast. Motherboard is Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0.
I did the install, just to prove to myself it could be done.
My old AGP video card has a driver for Win98, so I can even play
games there if I want. I doubt I'd have been as lucky, if a
PCI Express video card had been present in the machine.

A retail motherboard should have a full-featured BIOS, unlike
the BIOS you'd get in an HP/Dell/Gateway etc., and you should be
able to set the disk mode before starting the install. You can
even download the motherboard user manual in advance, and verify
that all necessary ingredients are present.

HTH,
Paul
.

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