Hi folks,

Before I dive right into the problem I am having, let me give you a little history on what I've been trying to do and the obstacles that were in my way to get to the point I am at now.

My friend just built his own computer, trashed the old one including it's damaged PATA hard drive and replaced it with a fresh SATA drive for his new Intel motherboard. The computer is finished being built and it is time to install Windows XP Professional. We insert the setup CD and boot off of it. To our surprise the hard drive is not detected by the Windows Setup disk (although the drive WAS detected in CMOS).

So we find out that the Windows XP setup program lacks the drivers for the Intel SATA controller and we find the Intel floppy disk that we are supposed to boot while the Windows setup program loads, to boot up the SATA controller drivers. Sounds fine and dandy, but one issue. The motherboard does not have a FDD controller!

After searching for a solution all night, we find a program named nLite. This allows you to make a new Windows XP setup disk and integrate the .inf SATA drivers into the disk so you don't have to worry about the floppy. So I download the SATA drivers off of Intel's website and go to run the executable file on my laptop so I can grab the .inf files and add them to the Windows setup disk. But it will not allow me to run the executable file because "my system does not meet the minimum requirements to run the file".

Fed up, I hop in my car, drive home and pull out a old 10GB PATA hard drive out of a ancient computer and pop it in the newly built machine. Windows setup detects it, formats it, installs Windows XP Pro and everything runs great.

Now to install the SATA drivers onto Windows, format the SATA drive and copy Windows over to it. Nothing else can go wrong right?

After the drivers are installed Windows detects the SATA drive with no problem. I boot up command prompt and type:

CD \
FORMAT E:
(Format as NTFS, blah blah blah)

The drive formats with no issues and now its time to copy over. I read about using XCOPY to perform this and it sounded like the easiest option so I did it. Opened up command prompt and typed the following commands.

CD \
XCOPY C:\ E:\ /S /E /H /C /K /R

Everything copies over 100% or so it looked that way. Thinking I am done, I turn off the computer, remove the 10GB hard drive, make sure everything looked good in the BIOS and attempted to boot the hard drive.

But unfourtunetly it did not. All that happened was a black, blank screen appeared with the command prompt type-bar flashing up in the upper left corner of the screen. Couldn't type anything though. Also I am not sure if I am mixing this up with another failure we had while we were trying to get this thing working, but I believe it eventually said "No bootable disk available" which makes me think I need to load up Recovery Console and make a boot record. But it was late and I was tiered.

Perhaps I should just get Norton Ghost and try giving that a shot.

Also, before I end this booklet. In the Intel BIOS, there is a setting for SATA drives and it had the choices of running the SATA as RAID, IDE or AHCP (I think that was what it was called). Any idea if this could have anything to do with it?

I'm sorry for all the text, thanks so much for reading. Any support would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi there mate, sorry for the late response.

Are you sure you got the actual sata drivers? You will more than likely have to create an mbr, but I'm not sure if it will work.

I have found nLite is usually the best option, do you have access to a system with a floppy drive? If so the best option (in my opinion) would be to copy the drivers from the floppy that came with the motherboard and integrate those using nLite.

Hope this helps

-Lebowski

Thanks a lot, Lebowski.

Great idea. I'm going to give that a shot.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Good luck mate.