[Ham-Computers] RE: XP with SATA Harddrive

[Hsu, Aaron (NBC Universal)]

Happy New Year, Robert (et al),
 
You didn't run into any issues as you used the <F6> method to install Windows.  Basically, when you press <F6> when first booting from the installation CD, it will (eventually) open an additional panel asking for the appropriate driver.  Had you not pressed <F6>, then you would have ended up at a screen informing you that no hard drives were detected.

The only exception to this is if the SATA controller was set to "legacy" mode (aka "native" mode disabled).  When configured this way, the SATA controller *acts* like a basic IDE controller - Windows will install the generic IDE controller driver during it's initial installation (or a WHQL driver, if supplied with Windows), and it's up to the user to install the appropriate chipset specific driver once Windows' installation is completed.

*** HOWEVER ***
If Windows is installed with the controller in "Legacy" mode, it's a royal PITA to later convert it to "Native" SATA mode due to a difference in the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL).  "Native" SATA controllers are treated like SCSI controllers and the Windows architecture handles SCSI controllers differently than IDE controllers (in fact, SCSI is truly "native" in the NT architecture and IDE controllers are "add-ons").

In short, choose a mode you want to run in prior to installing Windows - it comes down to convenience ("legacy" SATA) vs performance ("native" SATA).


73,

  - Aaron, NN6O



-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2008 12:54 PM
Subject: Re: [Ham-Computers] RE: XP with SATA Harddrive

I'm a little puzzled by all of this.  We're still running W2K here but will eventually have to switch to XP I suppose.  I assume that if XP lacks support for SATA, so does W2K.  But I had to replace (actually, I didn't have to but didn't discover why the board had started randomly rebooting until after the fact) the system board in our main machine a few months ago.  And ended up with an Intel board with six SATA connectors and on-board RAID capability.  So I replaced all the drives as well.  

I don't recall having any problems in bringing the new system up, with two RAID and two non-RAID drives.  The drives were configured in BIOS Setup and then the driver loaded by pressing F6 when I got to the SCSI driver prompt during OS installation.  Is this (nLite, etc.) all necessary because the machine is a Compaq?

Robert Downs - Houston
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