Win XP - SATA Question

[Hagar]

Three years ago I installed a SATA HDD (500G) on an Intel motherboard and
then installed Windows XP, Home Edition and everything ran fine.

Just put together a new machine with an ASUS board and a SATA HDD and once
again no XP installation problem.

The wizards at work tell me that is impossible, since XP does not support
SATA and that, at a minimum, I'd have to load some SATA drivers from a FDD
before installation, which of course I didn't and wasn't prompted to, by the
XP installation program. On both machines, when I go into the BIOS, the HDDs
are listed and recognized and the computers are working fine.

So my question is: what is the real story with Win XP and the SATA
compatibility ?? and why did it work for me when everyone said it couldn't
possibly ???

TIA,

Hagan Sahm

[Alias]

With the new motherboards, using a floppy, as you have seen, isn't
necessary any more. The "everyone" you refer to is thinking about the
old motherboards.

--
Alias

[DL]

It depends what controller is being used eg Ahci mode as apposed to sata
controller

"Hagar" <ha...@sahm.name> wrote in message
news:ZsidncmQlKzC31rW...@giganews.com...

[Robert Kochem]

Hagar wrote:

> Three years ago I installed a SATA HDD (500G) on an Intel motherboard and
> then installed Windows XP, Home Edition and everything ran fine.
>
> Just put together a new machine with an ASUS board and a SATA HDD and once
> again no XP installation problem.

If you are using an unmodified XP installation disk this indicates your
SATA drives are running in compatibility mode which means the BIOS emulates
IDE drives.

Robert

[Twayne]

In news:ZsidncmQlKzC31rW...@giganews.com,
Hagar <ha...@sahm.name> typed:

For the full story, look it up on Wikipedia.com which does an
admirable job of it in good detail. There are a few details in
"history" you might find interestings, such as "IDE mode"
etc..

For the short story, tell your "wizards" that things change
and their information is not current. They're a little sloppy
in the head to be telling you something you did can't happen,
don't you think? Open minds would have said something like
"... what? Tell me how you did that again? Huh! Didn't know
that" and maybe gone off to update their information.
I'd suggest downgrading them from "wizard" to "street
knowledge".
XP has supported SATA since at least SP2. If your mobo has
the SATA connectors, then it's almost a sure thing that all
you need to do is physically plug the drive/s in. My 6 year
old Gateway with SP2 supported SATA drives from the git-go.
There ARE instances where you could need the drivers,
especially if there are some after-market value that was
provided by some 3rd party, but ... it shouldn't be necessary
unless you have very old hardware, in which case XP isn't
running well on it anyway<g>.

HTH,

Twayne`

[sanjacstudent12]

"unknown" wrote:

> It depends on your motherboard. I believe that there are BIOS' out there that support SATA natively. Are you able to find the documentation for your board, or the service manual for your computer?