Did I imagine this, or does a SP3 disc now include this support on install, like Vista does?

Steve

it does afaik

what it doesn't have, that both vista and win7 do, it native support for raid. means in xp you either need a floppy disc with raid drivers, a usb stick with raid drivers (assuming mobo supports this) or more elegantly a slipstreamed xp install with raid drivers embedded eg nlite

Yes, I'm referring to native support, i.e. to avoid the need to insert a FDD with drivers on it, when often the systems don't have FDD drives and I have to rummage about for a USB FDD drive. Right PITA for generic unattended installs

Have been looking at slimstreaming and looks like I'll go down that road.

Thanks,

Steve

Right PITA for generic unattended installs

I'm sure you know you can slipstream the appropriate drivers for XP (any SP level).

Yes, I was just optimistically hoping an SP3 disc might have done the SATA/RAID slipstreaming for me. Some hope eh?!

Cheers,

Steve.

I thought I was imagining this too. Yesterday made a Win XP Pro SP3 Setup CD then thought ******** forgot to add the SATA drivers. Booted up and it noticed the SATA drive.

Very interesting!

IIRC It depends on what mode the SATA controller is running in...

Most have a "legacy" mode.. which will just let the O/S see them as IDE drives, but you dont get the feature support like SataII, hot-plug or NCQ.

Next up the tree is AHCI which does support the above features, but usually needs drivers for the cotroller. (vista etc has them built in)

And then RAID which also needs drivers.

Col's right. Forgot the check the Bios before I installed the OS. Was set to IDE nto AHCI.

Just done a quick test with the SP3 setup CD. Works for IDE but not AHCI or RAID as expected. I use nlite to integrate the drivers.

Thanks for the info. Knew about the IDE emulation stuff from our HP kit; it's just the other stuff I'm still tinkering with

Steve