SATA Drives, How Do I Install Windows?

[Fryall4]

Hello all,
The motherboard in my Sony Viao quit on me so I pulled my 2 sata hard drives (Maxtor Diamondmax 10 6L160MO's), other drives, ram, etc got a new case, mobo and fire it up. It goes through the boot process and says missing operating system. I boot to my WinXP Pro cd and of course it does not find the drive, so I hit F6 to install raid drivers and it just keeps trucking right past that and goes onto loading windows files. I finally get to specify additional device push "S" to specify drivers or press "Enter" if you don't have disk, blah, blah, blah. When I press "S" it takes me to search the floppy drive (I don't have a floppy drive), when I press "Enter" it loads the rest of the windows files and reboots. Upon restart we are back into windows setup, a vicious circle. I wanted to save the info on the hard drive but fear I am past that now, what with the formatting and all, LOL. Anyway, where I am now is stuck in this boot up circle and windows is not getting installed. I can go into the recovery console or the part where I format again. What do I do?

 

[tipstir]

Welcome to TechSpot!

Need to put the drivers on CD, but a CD with a bootable FDD mode. Nero and some CD burner software can do this. But if you didn't get a FDD or you don't have one then, you got a problem. Did the SATA HDD come with a CD? If it did then use that CD to Masterblaster to install the SATA HDD on your system.

 

[mailpup]

Yes, using the F6 method requires a floppy drive. There is no point in going there without a floppy. If you don't have a floppy drive and you don't want to install one (must be internal, not an external USB floppy), you can create a slipstream CD with Windows and the necessary SATA/RAID drivers.

 

[Fryall4]

Thanks for the welcome Tipstir. I didn't receive any floppy disk with the drives, they cam installed in my Sony Viao desktop. The Sony disk are not available to me, but I doubt they would work with the mobo being replaced. I may go to the sony website to try and find the drivers then install a floppy drive on the Sony Frankenstein and see if that'll go.

Thanks for the suggestion Mailpup. Where would be a good place to get the drivers? I was all over Seagate/ Maxtor and all I could find were applications as opposed to just drivers.

 

[mailpup]

The SATA/RAID drivers you want will be found at the motherboard manufacturer's website. Unless the new mobo is a Sony, you won't find the necessary drivers there.

What is your motherboard brand and model?

 

[Fryall4]

The Mobo is a J&W JWT945GC-A2, which has Intel 945GC chipset rockin it.
Motherboard Pic I will look through the manual again and find the site. Good idea!

I just checked jwele.com and they have drivers listed but the links are dead http://www.jwele.com/english/download/ Hmmm

 

[mailpup]

I checked the site too and found the links didn't work for me either. What a bad manufacturer's site. When you bought the new motherboard, did it come with a motherboard driver CD? If so, you might find the SATA/RAID drivers on it.

If you are installing XP with SP2, we can try one more thing. Windows XP SP2 contains some SATA drivers but not for all chipsets. I also think you might be making an error in the Windows setup process, but I'm not sure. After the hard drive is partitioned and Windows files are copied it reboots, correct? At this reboot you should be getting a message like, "Press any key to boot from CD." Do NOT press any key at this time. Do nothing. In a few seconds setup should continue by itself. If setup continues automatically, it appears you might not need to manually install SATA drivers. XP SP2 might have them for the Intel chipset. Anyway, it can't hurt to try.

 

[Fryall4]

When it went in the reboot circle of doom, I did not touch any keys it just went there automatically. I found that as long as I had a bootable cd in the drive it would just boot to it. I had "cd" as the first boot device in bios. I stopped the loop by ejecting the cd after it rebooted, windows started and then asked for the cd to finish it's thing. You must be correct in saying that windows had the sata driver in there somewhere, cause I sure didn't install them. I sure do appreciate your time with this, I have the machine running beautifully now. Cheers-

 

[mailpup]

That's good news. I'm glad the problem is solved.