If You start off a Windows XP, or earlier, Setup, you might, when seeing drives in the Setup screen, not recognize the HDD layout Windows shows You, or Windows may not detect Your HDD's at all.
I will explain why below.
Before continued reading You need to know this:
- What HDD's You have, eventual partitions of them, their respective sizes and brands. This is necessary to verify that Windows setup shows You correct information.
- What brand, model and eventual version Your motherboard is.
- Where You can find drivers to that Motherboard
Windows will show wrong information because it can not properly identify any of the following chips/controllers.
Serial ATA
Ultra Ata 100 or 133
RAID
(or others I do not recall now)
Those three require an extra chipset on Your motherboard. It could be integrated with another, or alone. If You connect HDD's to any of them, and Windows gives You wrong information in Setup, You must be prepared with a driver diskette and hitting F6 in the early stages on Windows Setup, first 5 seconds.
I will illustrate this with an example of Serial ATA.
The other controllers are dealt with in a similar manner.
I have a motherboard with Serial-ATA controllers: Asus A8V, and will use it as example. (Mind You there are currently 4 models of A8V, select the correct one)
I go to www.asus.com, I select appropriate country, in my case UK.
Downloads > Product > Motherboard > Socket 939 > A8V
Now I need the Serial ATA driver from that list.
Select Drivers Tab and scroll to a Serial ATA driver. Seems to be a BETA available but we take an older non-beta version, just in case.
I see VIA VT6420 (VT8237) SATA RAID Driver Package Version 2.20D WHQL. (WHQL means it has been tested and approved by Microsoft.)
Download it.
Extract the zip file (it may come in different ways depending on manufacturer) and look for a file called TXTSETUP.OEM.
Move that file, with all the content in that directory to a floppy.
Alternatives
- There could be a file (.exe) You can use to create a floppy. And no TXTSETUP.OEM.
- There could be another zip-file with those files.
- Other ways of giving You the files. Read any available .txt document.
No matter how You proceed You want the SATA drivers moved to a floppy with the TXTSETUP.OEM in the root.
As a result of a correct procedure, again depending on manufacturer, I will have a floppy with approximately this content:
root\TXTSETUP.OEM
root\VT640
root\PIDE\several folders for different windows versions
root\SATA\TXTSETUP.OEM
root\SATA\several folders for different windows versions
The drivers themselves are named: viasraid.cat , viasraid.sys and viasraid.inf (for this motherboard!).
With that floppy, start Your Windows Setup, hit F6 during the first few seconds as instructed, and insert the Floppy when told.
Assuming you know how Your HDD layout is, You should e able to recognize it, and conduct a correct installation of windows on Your computer.
Now, this is only an example.
Hope it helps anyone.
:thumb:
