SATA Drivers. Help please.

[Soluzar]

I need to reinstall my computer with Windows XP. I've been meaning to do so for a while now, but it took my a long enough time to make a backup of all my important files, and prepare myself for the re-installation process.

I hit a snag. Whenever I've had to install Windows on this machine before, it has required that I install some SATA drivers before the installation of Windows can proceed. These came on a floppy disk.

I lost the floppy.

I can probably find a copy of these drivers from somewhere. My motherboard is a named brand, and I won't have a problem downloading them from the net. What I do have a problem with is floppy discs. I don't own any, because they became obsolete sometime around 1992.

Is there any way I can handle this without having to start an archaeoligical dig to find the last remaining blank floppy in existance? Isn't there some other way that I can provide my computer with these drivers? Instead of floppies these days, I use an SD card reader if I need to take information from one place to another. That probably won't work here though.

I'm not even sure if the floppy drive on this thing would still work. It's been gathering dust constantly for about a year. ^_^

[Leader Desslock]

Burn the required drivers on CD. Point to the drivers during installation. it should work just fine. Windows won't care whether it's reading from the A: drive or the D: drive. It just wants the drivers.

My machine still has the 3.5" floppy drive that came with my original Packard Hell 386 SX-16. I've carried it over with every single upgrade I've ever done. I might even have a couple of floppies around, come to think of it.

[HSaabedra]

Does your BIOS recognize flash drives at boot? If it does just load them on it and go.

[Soluzar]

Burn the required drivers on CD. Point to the drivers during installation. it should work just fine. Windows won't care whether it's reading from the A: drive or the D: drive. It just wants the drivers.
Oh cool. That's a much more civilised solution than floppies. Thanks Desslock. I don't know why that didn't occur to me.

My machine still has the 3.5" floppy drive that came with my original Packard Hell 386 SX-16. I've carried it over with every single upgrade I've ever done. I might even have a couple of floppies around, come to think of it.
Until this computer, I too had a 3.5" floppy drive of some vintage which had been handed down through many upgrades. Then when I got this one, I decided to keep the old PC intact for other things. So I bought my second 3.5 floppy drive in about 20 years of PC ownership. :lol:

Does your BIOS recognize flash drives at boot? If it does just load them on it and go.
See, I'm not at all sure. If it did, then I'd much prefer that solution. Flash drives are by far my favourite portable media.

[sazae]

If it's an ASUS board just hold down Alt+F2 and update the BIOS. Every board they have out that's not ancient can be set up with the new updates to make sure that anything that requires a floppy can be read off of a CD. Saved my butt when I recently had to recover from a RAID 0 crash but didn't have the SATA drivers on floppy for my hard drives.

[Gray]

Does your BIOS recognize flash drives at boot? If it does just load them on it and go.

It dosent, infact its not the flash, but the USB drivers. They dont Initiliaze untill Windows loads. I know this becuase i have to use a PS2 Keyboard everytime i need to go into Bios, since my USB Keyboard wont work untill i get to my Logon screen.

[Kaoru9124]

There are some newer boards that can boot from flash drives, but I'd imagine that the BIOS doesn't have any system in place to make non-booted flash drives look like a regular drive to whatever OS comes after that. Have you checked if there's an "IDE compatibility" option for the SATA channels in your BIOS? The Asus board in my PC has an option named along those lines, and it helped the 2000 setup program find my SATA boot drive. Well, not so much "find" as "disguise", but it works just as well either way.
And to FMH - have you checked for a "Legacy USB Support" or "64/60 emulation" option in the BIOS? I'm pretty sure one or the other made my USB keyboard recognizable by the computer at POST.