I bought a laptop this week at Carre Foure. As is standard here in Thailand it came without an operating system. I have a copy of Win XP SP3 and tried to install it. The new laptop has a SATA hard drive but the OS download disk does not have the proper driver for a SATA controller. The install process has a function that allows for third party driver downloads but it must be on a 3.5 floppy drive(remember those?) No computer has a floppy drive anymore. I was able to disable the native SATA drive during the inititial install and was able to complete the install. But now I have the new 160GB HDD operating as an IDE device. When I tried to download the proper driver in the Windows environment it was blocked saying my system does not support SATA(because I turned it off), When I reactive the native SATA option I get the blue screen of death. Any harm in leaving the SATA off? Any work around to get the driver installed up front?

Thanks

P

I bought a laptop this week at Carre Foure. As is standard here in Thailand it came without an operating system. I have a copy of Win XP SP3 and tried to install it. The new laptop has a SATA hard drive but the OS download disk does not have the proper driver for a SATA controller. The install process has a function that allows for third party driver downloads but it must be on a 3.5 floppy drive(remember those?) No computer has a floppy drive anymore. I was able to disable the native SATA drive during the inititial install and was able to complete the install. But now I have the new 160GB HDD operating as an IDE device. When I tried to download the proper driver in the Windows environment it was blocked saying my system does not support SATA(because I turned it off), When I reactive the native SATA option I get the blue screen of death. Any harm in leaving the SATA off? Any work around to get the driver installed up front?

Thanks

P

You can use your existing XP cd to create a new cd that includes the SATA drivers you need. There's a tutorial here to show you how to do it. All the software is free and widely used.

http://paparadit.blogspot.com/2007/06/inst...th-windows.html

You don't need a floppy. If you go to the hard drive manufacturers web site, you should be able to find the SATA driver you need to include in the install CD.

There's no harm in leaving it in IDE mode. SATA would allow you to use NCQ and possibly hot plug, but if you don't know what that means you probably don't need those features.

ToMM: I tried this method(slipstreaming) but he driver was in an .exe format and the software need .inf files.

To Dave: Thanks for the input. My computer works fine in IDE mode so I'll just keep it

Thanks for the quick and informative replies.

P

Extract the .inf files from the .exe using a utility such as WinRar... Just open WinRar and then select open archive (including self-extracting), browse for the exe and extract it to a temporary folder.