Re: Reinstalling Windows

This is a complex subject, and it's hard to give specific rules because the whole area is specific to the BIOS, the chipset, the SATA and IDE controllers (MOST boards today have a dual mode SATA/IDE controller IN ADDITION TO the controllers (yes, usually plural ... multiple, distinct controllers) within the chipset). So I'll take some time to try and explain it. BUT YOUR SYSTEM IS PROBABLY DIFFERENT.

Let's take a typical system with an Intel ICH10R chipset (the EXACT description I am going to give applies to many Gigabyte and Asus motherboards).

ICH10R has two distinct controllers within it: A 4-port and a 2-port controller. But since it has NO IDE at all (none of the Intel chipsets for the past couple of years have had any), MOST motherboards have an additional controller, most commonly a JMicron part that has both still more SATA ports and an IDE port.

There is one thing that is absolute: WINDOWS XP DOES NOT NATIVELY RECOGNIZE SATA DRIVES. AT ALL. PERIOD. (OEM distributions may, however).

BIOS' ***MAY*** provide an emulation of IDE drives from SATA drives. Or they may not. If the emulation is provided you may be able to turn it on or off (or it may be always on). If you can turn it on or off, the default may be .... EITHER on or off.

With the emulation on, XP installs easily, but the emulation is inferior to using the SATA drives as SATA drives (which XP doesn't natively support). In order to install XP on a true SATA system using the drives as sata drives (and keep in mind that all of this applies to laptops also), you must install an "F6 Driver" very early in the Windows setup process. THIS REQUIRES A FLOPPY DRIVE ... no, you can't do this ... ever ... from a flash or other drive. However, if the system (motherboard) supports booting from a USB floppy drive, it will likely work for this purpose also. [Another option that will work is to integrate ("slipstream") an XP installation CD with F6 drivers and make a new XP installation CD that now has native SATA support included.]

The question often comes up "I installed XP using the emulation, can I later switch to true SATA mode?"; the answer is that it EXTREMELY difficult, but not necessarily impossible. There are many writeups on the web discussing how to do it (again, it's not easy). And every one of them that allows feedback and comments has about an equal number of "it worked" and "it failed" comments. And if it fails, you may be left with a corrupted system that won't boot at all.

Ok, so if we have that much .... we are about half done.

Most chipsets and other (JMicron) controller support 3 major modes of operation for the SATA ports:

1. Raid
2. Native SATA (most commonly called AHCI)
3. IDE emulated from physical SATA

Unfortunately, there are not completely uniform names for either 2. or 3.

Further, in a development that many missed, there are now two kinds of IDE (either physical or emulated):

A. "Legacy IDE"
B. "Native IDE"

And, again, although these terms are common, they are not universal.

Legacy IDE is good old right out of about 1990 IDE.

Native IDE is a newer standard for the IDE controller that lets the controllers use many newer PCI bus features, including in particular much more flexible interrupt assignments with both variable interrupts and shared interrupts (legacy IDE requires fixed IRQ 14 and 15 interrupts).

So, often, you will have two BIOS settings for the drive ports in ICH10R (the Intel chipset), corresponding to the two categories above (Raid/AHCI/IDE and Legacy IDE/Native IDE).

THEN YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER SET OF MORE OR LESS CORRESPONDING CHOICES FOR ANY ADDITIONAL STORAGE CHIPS (e.g. for a JMicron Chip that provides REAL (physical) IDE ports, AND more SATA ports, which can be used in a RAID array). Or that additional chip can be disabled totally and entirely.

[BTW, it's a really good idea to understand which SATA connectors go to the Intel chipset and which go to the non-Intel storage controllers (if any). They are usually color coded.

Also note, if you want to do the installation on a drive connected to the non-Intel storage controller (say a JMicron chip), you need ... AN F6 DRIVER (this MAY apply even to IDE drives (real from the IDE port or emulated from a SATA drive, since this is not the chipset, but the BIOS may (or may not) integrate support for this chip so that it is as complete as the ports in the chipset). But wait ..... it's a DIFFERENT F6 driver from the one for the ports on the Intel chip.

Anyway, hope that helps and answers some of your questions. It's become a LOT more complicated than it used to be.


Jerry West wrote:
Okay, I went into the BIOS and changed the SATA drive configuration to Autodetect/ATA. That allowed setup to start versus giving me the error originally I posted about. So what does this mean in the end? That I need special drivers during the installation process to make Windows "see" the drive? This is clearly a big clue to what has been going on. Can I change it back to the faster setting after Windows completes the install? Does this mean I need to go find new SATA drivers for the DOS portion of install for XP?

JW

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