XP Install and SATA Help Needed

[nickb23]

Hi All,

I am trying to load XP Home on a 50G partition on a Samsung 500GB SATA HD. When it got to the point where it asked me to install, it could not find it. I found out that this is because XP did not have SATA drivers built in. So I am trying to streamline my Windows XP installation to include SP2 using Nlite. Does SP2 have the SATA drivers I need? I have the following kit

Asus A8N-E Mobo
Samsung 500GB SATA HDD

I havn't been able to find what SATA drivers the nforce4 ultra chipset uses, and I cannot find the seperate SATA drivers anywhere to include in the streamline.

Can anyone help?

Many Thanks

Nick

[Singh400]

Yeah, SP2 will include most common SATA drivers. Just slipstream/integrate SP2.exe into Windows installation source.

[nickb23]

Hi there again,
Well I was able to create a slipstream XP disc, including SP2 aswell as the sata drivers I extracted from the latest nforce update from Nvidia. It all seems to go great, it finds my partitioned sata drive. I choose the drive I want to install on. reformat it to NTFS, and it copies all the files on for the install. It then says it needs to reboot, so I let it. After rebooting, it loads, but instead of going through to the XP installation, it hangs with the following message:

"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information"

I have tried everything that I can think of, but to no avail. I have now gone back to my old xp install on my ide drive, but this is not what I want to really do. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Nick

[Singh400]

Maybe adding the nforce drivers caused the error? SP2 includes most drivers for pratically all SATA drives.

Just try installing XP + SP2. Do not add anything else.

[nickb23]

Right, I think I might have made some headway to finding out what is causing this.
When I got my Samsung 500G SATA drive, I was using it with an old noisy ide drive that had XP on it. It was always my intention to partition the samsung into at least 2 parts, one for XP installation, and one for my photos, music etc.. So I decided to take the plunge and partition it with partition magic. I set up 2 x 30 gig partitions and 1 x 416+ gig partiton (all NTFS - drive letters d,e & f). The 2 30 gig ones were to hold xp each. One for everyday use, and the other for home entertainment using Media Portal, so that it is kept nice and clean. Job Done I thought. So I also slipstreamed the XP Home installation with SP2, unplugged the old IDE drive and started to install windows. With the inclusion of SP2, it was able to find the SATA partitons, so I went and started to install onto the first 30gig partiton (I also did a quick NTFS format too). It copied the files and then when the first reboot came up, all fine until the following:
"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information"

this was driving me nuts, so I was able to hook up the old ide drive with xp on it, and boot straight in. I noticed that th correct 30gig sata partition did have the windows files on it, but I also noticed that the large 416+gig partiton also had the boot.ini file plus some others. I opened up Partiton magic, and saw that the large partition was the primary partition and the other 2 the logical ones. So I changed it around and made the first 30gig one he primary and the large one logical. Reebooted, unplugged the IDE and installed windows again. Got up to first reboot, and instead of the above message, got a different one, which was something like "Error - Windows cannot be started"

I think what I am going to do is to backup the photos, and remove all the partitons off the SATA and let it partition and format when I install XP. Hopefully this will work, as I have now spent 2 nights trying to sort this out, and I am tired!!!



Nick