Installing Windows 2000/XP on a new SATA
drive
Some motherboards that support SATA hard
drives implemented the feature by adding a separate SATA controller. This
let manufacturers include the feature on motherboards whose chipsets did
not natively support SATA. If your motherboard brings up a second screen during
the POST process which identifies the Serial ATA hard drives, it is
generally because this feature is supported by a dedicated chipset.
Because of this, when installing Windows 2000/XP for the
first time onto a SATA drive supported by a dedicated chipset, you
will need to inform the installation process that your Serial ATA drives are on a separate controller. This is done by providing
the software drivers for the controller to the install process (hit F6,
and insert a floppy disk with the SATA controller drivers) at the beginning of
the process. If you do not do this, the install process may stop, informing
you that it cannot find any hard drives .
If this happens to you, follow the steps
below:
Begin the Windows 2000/XP installation process by powering on your system,
inserting the operating system CD and pressing any key to boot from the CD when
prompted.
As soon as the Windows 2000/XP installation process
starts (blue screen), there will be a small prompt at the bottom of the
screen which says 'Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver.' Hit
F6 right away, preferably more than once.
The installation process will continue, and eventually you will be prompted for those additional drivers. Insert your SATA driver floppy
disk (which will have come with your motherboard) into the FDD drive, then
hit 'S' to specify additional devices. The installation process will search for
the driver files on the disk and display a list. Select the correct device then
hit ENTER to continue the installation as normal. The drive will be partitioned
and formatted as part of the install process. You can now install Windows
as normal.
If Serial ATA drive
support is native to the motherboard chipset, you do not need to provide
drivers during the installation procedure. Any recent Intel and AMD chipset will support
SATA fully.
Installing Windows 2000/XP on a new IDE drive
This is
the easy part. Pop in your Win2K or XP CD and reboot the computer. You should get
the option to 'press any key to boot from CD.' If you do not see this, you may
have to go into the BIOS setup (by pressing the 'del' key upon rebooting) and
make sure that your CD is selected as a boot device. This option is generally
found in the 'advanced BIOS setup' menu option in the BIOS screen.
Once you have begun
the installation procedure, relax and follow the prompts. You will be shown your
available drives and prompted to create, size and format partitions on them
as part of the installation process. Nothing outside the install needs
to be done unless you opt not to use the full space of your
new drive for installing Windows.
If you have left space free on your new drive, once
the installation is finished you will need to go into disk manager by right
clicking 'my computer' and selecting 'manage.' Once you are in the management
screen, select 'disk management.' From here, the unpartitioned space on your
hard disk can be seen as the black 'unpartitioned space' section in the graphic
display on the bottom pane.
Simply right click the unused space and select 'new partition' to use this
space. The wizard will walk you through creating, sizing and formatting
the partition with NTFS or FAT32.
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