Do I need a floppy for SATA-2?

[beef_jerky4104]

Well I was planning on getting my new system soon when I noticed something. It I am correct, when using SATA with Windows XP PRO SP2, you require a floppy to install windows on a SATA drive. When I was looking at the board I'm planning to get and noticed that it doesn't come with a floppy containing the RAID and/or SATA drivers. The motherboard is a Biostar tForce 550 AMD AM2 board. I was wondering if I was correct about needing a floppy to load the drivers. I also checked Biostars website and it doesn't contain a download to the SATA drivers that may be required. So well...DUH. So would I be able to install XP on this drive without a floppy? Perhaps the drivers are on the CD? If so could I use the CD to load the SATA drivers. Oh yeah and I do have 2 DVD-RW 18/16X drives. So getting an extra driver wouldn't be a problem.

 

[Tedster]

You should always include a floppy drive on any system. Even if you never intend to use it. May BIOS upgrades and core architecture programming require floppies as well as legacy programs.

 

[beef_jerky4104]

You didn't answer the core question. Which is "Do I need a floppy disk drive to load the SATA drivers for a Windows XP Computer?"

 

[HPCE_Larry]

He sorta did. The answer is yes.

 

[beef_jerky4104]

Then wouldn't the motherboard manufacture give me a floppy which contains the drivers? Also the website would then provide the drivers also right?

EDIT: Nevermind, thread bump. Lawl, even though on newegg and even biostar make no mention of a floppy containing the SATA driver. It obviosly there because other boards on newegg come with them but newegg and the manufactures make no note of it. It seems the SATA driver is somewhat passable.

 

[gavilan]

my mobo (asus p4c800-E deluxe) didnt require a sata driver disk when i installed winxp sp2

 

[Didou]

Not all motherboard require a floppy for the SATA drives to be recognized during the Windows install. Most of the time if the SATA connectors are provided by the Southbridge chipset, drivers are not needed. If the SATA connections are provided by a 3rd party add-on (Silicone Image, Promise, etc.) then yes you will need drivers on a floppy (or an USB stick as the Vista setup can load drivers from there).

I personally have not used a floppy drive in years even to update my BIOS when necessary. If you really need to do so, there are quite a few boot disks that you can find in ISO format so you can burn them on a CDRW.

 

[thewoosterisroot]

I've only actually setup one Sata drive (HD) so far, but I didn't need to use a floppy drive or anything of the sort.