Re: Reinstalling Windows

Somewhere on teh intarwebs Barry Watzman wrote:
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.

But... This is a laptop newsgroup.

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.

I've attempted it twice, once for my Asus mobo'd desktop with ICH9R /
JMicron controllers and once for my IBM T60 ThinkPad (ICH7-M/U) and both
times it worked just fine, all done in 15 minutes.
--
Shaun.

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's
warm for the rest of his life." Terry Pratchet, 'Jingo'.

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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