Today i installed a new 200 gig sata hdd into my pc i have eventually got xp to recognise the hd and have formatted it ...it is listed as the E drive in "my computer" i then unplugged my 40 gig ide hard drive in an attempt to boot from the xp installation disk and do a fresh install of xp onto the sata.....but....it will does not work i get a system disk failure command on the screen ...am i doing something silly ??? the copy of xp is a multi user edition with service pack 2 kindly donated to me from my employer Any help would be appreciated

You will need the xp driver floppy for the sata controller. If you only have a cdrom with the drivers on you will need to copy those onto floppy.

When the XP CD is booting and asks "Press F6 to install other drivers" then press F6 and insert the floppy when prompted.

Alternativly, now you have the drivers in your current XP install, use symantec Ghost to copy from one drive to the other. Disconnect the old one, config youy bios to boot from the sata controller and voila, one XP install on your new drive.

SSH!t i have not got floppy in new system never use them thse days...any other ways round it

See above post RE: use of ghost.

You will need a floppy, no other way around it doing a fresh install.

XP is nearly 5 years old now, and although it had drivers for most stuff when new the included drivers doesnt include any new hardware/motherboard support except for HD's connected to the standard IDE header.

Actually there IS a way round it, which is to make a disc that has the drivers already on it. Also, a lot of USB storage devices can be seen from DOS if you enable the options in the BIOS. You may not be as out of luck as it seems

I was told some newer motherboards with fiddling in the BIOS settings can make SATA drives look like PATA/IDE ones in order to work with XP for when there is no floppy drive....

Funny that about not being able to install XP onto Sata drives, via a fresh install, as i didnt have any problems at all installing XP Pro onto a Sata drive installing it from CD ???

Funny that about not being able to install XP onto Sata drives, via a fresh install, as i didnt have any problems at all installing XP Pro onto a Sata drive installing it from CD ???

Could be your SATA controller is hooked up to the onboard IDE controller. This is the case with some motherboards.

If I try to install XP onto mine without the drivers, it just comes up and says it cant find any HD's.

Cheers, i'll remember this for any future upgrades etc i might get asked to do

Cant for the life of me remember what the MoBo was, as i built it a few months ago for a relative, and not seen the machine since

I recently moved to a sata drive and was worried about these problems. Luckily for me my drivers were covered with the sp2 slipstream cd I had. Only other thing I stuffed up on though was making sure I didnt have another drive in the system. It picked up my other ide drive as system even though it installed everything on the sata. Only way round this was to remove all drive apart from the one I wanted xp on. Made sure it was set to boot from this as first hard drive then install xp. If service pack 2 doesnt see your drive then you will need the drivers on a floppy and press f6 when prompted.

Am at it again when i look in the BIOS i cannot see any mention of the SATA drive even though windows can see it perfectly well !!!

had this trouble when he had scsi stuff a few years ago, silly floppy disks

Am at it again when i look in the BIOS i cannot see any mention of the SATA drive even though windows can see it perfectly well !!!

I had exactly this problem about a month ago, tearing my hair out shouting etc:

http://www.briskoda.net/forums/showthread.php?t=40004

As said above you definitely need the drivers on a floppy (or USB key etc).