New hard drive and new copy of XP, What do I need to get it installed and working?

[Iain Shields]

Hi folks,

Hope the title explained my problem correctly...

I built myself an AMD, NForce2 based computer about six months ago with all new components (case, mobo, processor and memory) except for the hard drive, I took that out of my old computer which had Win 98se and all my other programmes on it and used it in the new build to tide me over till I could get a new one.

I now want got get myself a new SATA hard drive (my mobo supports it) and a new copy of Win XP to use in the new computer but I don't know how to put XP onto a brand new hard drive or what I need to do it... could someone please explain it to me? I'm not worried about keeping any of the info on my old hard drive, or in fact, keeping the old drive as it's old and only 10 gig (I'll just stick what I want to keep on a cd-r and load it onto the new one)

I'm thinking of gettinng the new hard drive (Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160 gig 8mb SATA150, for £95.31 inc. del) from the site below as it seems to be well priced and they also sell OEM DSP version's of Windows XP home or pro (for £68 and £120 respectively) when you buy a piece of hardware from them, does anyone forsee any problems in doing this? I know OEM means it's a non-retail version but what does the DSP mean?
http://www.simply.co.uk

Thanks in advance for any help given, if you need any more info on specs or anything, just ask...

Regards,
Iain.

[KraGorn]

A normal XP CD is bootable, so all you need is a CD/DVD drive enabled in the BIOS for booting and away you go. It'll allow you to create an initial boot partition, and others if you so choose. Is this what you're asking?

Have to say 'DSP' is this context is a new acronym on me. If it's being sold with a hard disk then that's normal procedure for the OEM versions of M$ these days, they can only be sold with a 'new computer' (which is a pretty elastic term).

Personally I don't think I'd be concerned about this 'DSP' tag .. unless someone else knows something.

[gab2001uk]

Set the BIOS to boot from CD, stick XP in the CD drive and follow the instructions. It should do all the drive preparation etc for you.
Depending on your mobo, you may need to set it to boot from SATA after installation.

[JohnS]

Its likly to be more complicated with a serial drive than an ata, the motherboard will probably come with a floppy with a serial driver on it.

As the others said, set bios to boot from cd, put the cd in and boot from it, as xp begins to lad installation drivers it will say some thing like "press F6 to load a scsi or raid driver", this is the point when you should load the serial driver. After that it will be a normal xp install, just follow the instructions.

This is theory for me, I haven't done it with a serial drive yet!

[KraGorn]

Good point John, I'd overlooked that .. but aren't SATA drives going to have INT 13 support from the BIOS to allow initial installation?

If not, I'm wondering whether it's worth the hassle of the SATA drive, I personally don't see the benefit of these at present given there is no native support in the current version of XP.

[JohnS]

I haven't bothered with serial yet because I dont see enough advantage to do so, maybe smaller cables for better airflow, but plenty of reasons not to like cable convertors, extra drivers, more expensive etc.

DSP stands for Delivery Service Partner and is the same as OEM and should be bought with hardware. OEM usually has some kind of branding somewhere on the license such as Dell or HP etc where as DSP is more generic for smaller distributors

[KraGorn]

Originally posted by TEK
DSP stands for Delivery Service Partner

Well I'd never have guessed that in a million years .. don't you just love the IT industry's ability to create TLAs.

lol me neither - I had to google it

[Iain Shields]

Thanks for all the replies folks, very helpfull indeed...

I've never done a new Opperating System install before which is what I'm mostly asking about (and worried about) and now I'm starting to worry about using a SATA150 hard drive with what you're saying...

My mobo is a MSI K7N2G-ILSR http://www.msicomputer.com/product/d...del=K7N2G-ILSR which has full support for SATA and comes with 2 leads for the hard drives, I thought I might aswell go SATA now while I'm upgrading, what do you think?

Regards,
Iain.

[EffTee]

Like JohnS says - you'll need the SATA driver on a floppy. When you boot from the XP CD it will ask you to hit F6 if you want to load a SCSI driver. That's the only extra complication around a SATA install. If you don't load the driver it won't find your new drive - very easy to tell if you've done it wrong

I've 2 of the Maxtor SATA 120gb drives set up as RAID 0, with XP.

EffTee

[KraGorn]

IMHO the choise of SATA vs. IDE is down to personal preference.

IDE disks aren't about to go away any time soon, so the 'futureproof' attraction of SATA is IMHO illusory. Performance on paper of SATA outstrips IDE but in the real world you'll never see it.

Ease of connection is attractive, as is the ability to connect more than 4 drives .. but who is ever going to connect more than 3 drives (taking one slot for CD/DVD) on anything other than a dedicated NAS device?

In any case, the fact the mobo supports SATA means that IF you wanted to you could.

Since JohnS and EffTee say it's pretty easy to get the drivers into XP for installation purposes then I guess if you feel you want to go SATA then there's no real problem.

Either way, your bigger decision is which brand/size/speed to go for, balancing noise, heat and capacity. BTW, unless you're into large-scale image processing, video ripping etc., don't be misled by benchmarks, ATA100 drives never approach that in real life, 5400 drives are NOT inordinately much slower than 7200 ones, but ARE a lot quieter and cooler.

[Iain Shields]

Thanks again for all the replies guys, I thinks everything's been pretty much answered...

I think if it's just a case of loading in some drivers during the install, then I'll probably go with the SATA drive (Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160 gig 8mb SATA150, for £95.31 inc. del) as it's only £3-4 more than the other.

I'm interested in doing video editing and also some music production when it's all up and running, which is the reason I'm after performance...

So just to recap about the install:-
Attach the hard drive and set to boot from cd in the bios
Put in the XP disc and follow the instructions about partitions, and when to installl hard drive and mobo drivers....
And that's it, sound good, or have I missed anything?

Regards,
Iain.

[KraGorn]

IIRC the prompt to insert the drivers disk appears at the bottom of the opening blue/white screen of the Setup. It stays on-screen for only a few seconds, so keep an eye out for it, if you miss it XP will soon complain about the lack of a hard disk .. if that happens hit the RESET button and try again.

[Iain Shields]

Thanks for that KraGorn, and thank-you very much everybody else for taking the time to help me out, all answers were very helpfull... Cheers!

Regards,
Iain.