screwed with VISTA when shopping for PC notebook

kenporter · Post by **kenporter** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 11:47 pm

Really? I am not sure how to explain that except my installation wouldn't detect the HD if I didn't press F6 to install the SATA driver. Maybe, and that's a maybe because I don't know the answer, it's because I installed from a Windows XP Service Pack 1 CD-Rom, which didn't have the appropriate SATA drivers. I am not sure why your HD was detected otherwise. Even now that I have SP2 installed and I want to restore my XP drive using Ghost, I have to use the old F6 trick, otherwise my destination drive which is the SATA drive will not be found.

Ken

Herne · Post by **Herne** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 1:30 am

Many modern motherboards have USB floppy emulation built in to the BIOS so you can emulate a floppy with a USB stick for F6 driver installs, or whatever.
HP tend to use a stupid custom BIOS tho' so this setting is probably not exposed.

Machinate · Post by **Machinate** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 2:17 am

kenporter wrote:Yes, unfortunately when installing the SATA HD driver (F6 is the command for that during Windows XP installation), the only way to install this driver from is from a floppy.

hmm. My new machine has a SATA drive, and the windows install ran right through that. no problems at all.

kenporter · Post by **kenporter** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 3:24 am

Dang, I wonder what the issue is with mine then. I just tried it again and it's still the same, without pressing F6 when running Ghost (or the Windows XP install) my SATA drive will not be detected.

Not sure why that is. I wish I could get around this, as I carry my floppy drive with me for this one reason only. Sorry for hi-jacking this thread, btw...

Thanks,
Ken

kenporter · Post by **kenporter** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 3:32 am

This is what I found on the HP site about the SATA driver I was talking about...

Description

This package contains the Intel Serial ATA (SATA) Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) Controller Driver. This package is used to create a diskette that is needed during a new operating system installation to ensure that the notebook hard drive is detected and usable for the installation.

I am not sure if this is chipset related or why I needed to do this and Machinate didn't.

Ken

forge · Post by **forge** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 4:11 am

Glu - surely you wont have to wait long for those drivers??

I wouldnt go out and buy Vista for the hell of it, but if it came with a new machine I was buying I'd gladly accept it

the new one is always going to be better - at least eventually

there always seems to be loads of this apprehension around when something new comes out, I remember when XP came out these people were saying "I'm not upgrading, 98's better...blah" but how much better is XP than 98????

shaneblyth · Post by **shaneblyth** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 5:00 am

forge wrote:Glu - surely you wont have to wait long for those drivers??

I wouldnt go out and buy Vista for the hell of it, but if it came with a new machine I was buying I'd gladly accept it

the new one is always going to be better - at least eventually

there always seems to be loads of this apprehension around when something new comes out, I remember when XP came out these people were saying "I'm not upgrading, 98's better...blah" but how much better is XP than 98????

Depends on what you mean by better. Frankly for audio use (and I mean a system that is used for one job and one job only)it would be better to get a stripped down OS and scream along.. There is just too much bloat in the modern OS and a bunch of stuff totally unnecessary for Audio recordings.. I remeber the windows lite idea. Maybe someone should take something like XP or 98 of all things and turn it into a DAW only system.. actually isnt there a Music Keyboard that has a dedicated PC system in it.?

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 5:18 am

kenporter wrote:This is what I found on the HP site about the SATA driver I was talking about...

Description

This package contains the Intel Serial ATA (SATA) Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) Controller Driver. This package is used to create a diskette that is needed during a new operating system installation to ensure that the notebook hard drive is detected and usable for the installation.

I am not sure if this is chipset related or why I needed to do this and Machinate didn't.

Ken

I think you just have to tell the bios to have the SATA as the primary hard drives and not the IDE. Then XP should be able to detect them. The F6 options is only if external cards, controllers, or SCSI drives.

v00d00ppl · Post by **v00d00ppl** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 5:19 am

is there a way i can dual boot xp and vista?

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 5:21 am

Glu's experience reminds me of the old days, back when I had a Mac. It was like 1996, and I booted up and got the frowny face, meaning my disk was dead. I opened up the mac and pulled out the IDE drive. I called Egghead (newegg.com hadn't happened yet) and asked if they had any Mac drives. They said they had plenty, and if I wanted a new 1gb drive, it would be $200. I was thinking 1GB! holy shit! can you imagine what I can store with 1gb?!?!?!?

So then I asked, "well wait a sec, my friend has a PC, and he just bought a 1gb hard drive for $120. Isn't the mac just IDE as well?" The sales guy said, "No no, macs use different hard drives that cost more."

I then went to another store and got the PC IDE drive for $120 and put it in my Mac. The frowny face went away.

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 5:22 am

v00d00ppl wrote:is there a way i can dual boot xp and vista?

Yes. Preferably on different partitions.

kenporter · Post by **kenporter** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 6:08 am

nebulae wrote:
I think you just have to tell the bios to have the SATA as the primary hard drives and not the IDE. Then XP should be able to detect them. The F6 options is only if external cards, controllers, or SCSI drives.

The SATA HD is the only drive in my system and therefore it is set as my primary HD. I found there's a native SATA mode that I can enable and disable in the BIOS. The SATA mode "enabled" is for OS' that support SATA and the "disabled" setting is for older OS'. Right now it's enabled since I have XP installed. I'll try to disable it and see what happens...

Thanks,
Ken

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 6:29 am

cool, keep us posted...

Machinate · Post by **Machinate** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 12:10 am

kenporter wrote:This is what I found on the HP site about the SATA driver I was talking about...

Description

This package contains the Intel Serial ATA (SATA) Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) Controller Driver. This package is used to create a diskette that is needed during a new operating system installation to ensure that the notebook hard drive is detected and usable for the installation.

I am not sure if this is chipset related or why I needed to do this and Machinate didn't.

Ken

Ken, my system was NOT flawless after all. In fact, I'm dealing with a number of chipset problems right now... sorry to have lead you on like that. Apparently I could see, partition and format the SATA drive, but writing and reading from it with larger files throws a ton of CRC errors. Chipset driver disk to the rescue.

forge · Post by **forge** » Sun Feb 25, 2007 7:55 am

well, just thought I'd update you

it seems being an IT student I get a version of vista as part of the MSDN type thing for education

so I've installed it on another partiton and so far wasted hours and hours trying to find an up to date video card driver - Nvidia doesnt seem to have one but they have updated most of their stuff to Vista - it's a laptop Geforce4 440 and I did a compatability test thing on their website and it said I failed on vertex shading and pixel shading - my versions arent high enough apparently

I dont know if I can update them anyway (firmware)

then there's good old M-audio who havent got round to it yet even though they've probably had vista for well over a year now!

I chatted to a young guy working for MS in office works yesterday happily telling me that lack of drivers was a "myth" but so far my experience hasnt been great with drivers

I guess they dont have 3-4 year old PCs in mind

so anyway it works ok, there's alot of things I like about it, but it looks like shit because the graphics driver is "standard VGA driver" - I dont seem to have this "aero" thing - I guess that's a limitation

seems weird that I can get it looking heaps better under XP though

havent had the chance to do any hardcore testing with Live or anything yet as I've just been messing around with all this

screwed with VISTA when shopping for PC notebook

Floppies on lappies