my friend has just brought a Seagate Barracuda Seriel ata hard drive,its the new generation hot plugable drive,it can be plugged in when your pc is running BUT he wants to put a fresh install of winxp on it and cannot,the splash screen on boot up sees the drive but when it tries to load xp it just stops and does nothing,is there a special way to set up these drives,he has tried everything he knows without success,he has taken his old drive out so this is the only drive in the system and is to be his main and only drive,are ther any instructions out there?

You might need to install the SATA drivers first. They are usually on the motherboard drivers cd. When you start to install windows it asks you at the start to press one of the F keys at the top if you want to install third party raid drivers. This will prompt you to load the drivers. Im not sure if you can install the drivers from the cd i think you will need to copy them to a floppy disk first

Get the SATA drivers from cd and put them onto a floppy. when you boot from cd it will say "press F6 to install 3rd party scsi or raid drivers" PRESS F6, after it loads all it's files it will ask for the drivers you said you had when you pressed F6. So press "s"insert the floppy when it asks for it and press enter. Then install windows as usual

Thanks for that but everything you suggested has been tried also these new drives are plug and play and do not need any additional drivers.As far as i have read on the net people are having problems with these drives and are using them for storage instead of main drive.I thought you had to partition the drive first before windows will install but as this is done through the windows disk it has now become a catch 22 situation,cannot partition because windows will not install.

dude do what i said and it will work insert your xp cd and set the bios to boot from cd have the SATA drive connected. BTW they are not plug and play they are HOT plugable which means that after you have the drivers installed and the drive is partitioned you can plug it in while the pc is on that's all

Again thanx for your help,will try want you said and get back to you.

You may also need to turn on the SATA controler in BIOS. And, if it's a RAID controller, set it to non-RAID status.

I have the Seagate 200GB, Barracuda 7200.7 SATA 200822, on my Medion Computer and it uses the standard windows driver. I have a friend who tried installing the 160GB version on his computer from scratch and ran into the problem that the BIOS and Seagate setup only saw 32 GB. Using the Seagate software he was able to set it up so the full 160 GB was recognized but he had this annoying On-Track splash screen every time he booted. Apparently Seagate installs some kind of On-Track overlay that allows the BIOS to recognize the drive correctly. Seagate instructed him to go thru the procedure again and remove the On-Track, which he did, and then he found that the BIOS only recognized 137 GB (I understand that this is the largest that FAT32 can see, but he set it up for NTFS). Anyway he installed WinXP and found that WinXP saw all 160GB and to his amazement the BIOS now saw the full 160 GB also. I don’t know too much about this and I hope I am getting it right. I can only relate what he told me. He called Seagate for help, so I guess that is the best course of action. Anyway it is something new to learn.

Windows setup will not recognise ANY SATA drives without pressing F6 to install the drivers during setup

What do you do if you don't have a floppy drive on your PC. Most of the new ones leave them out to save a couple of cents.

I will check with my friend to see if he forgot to tell me about pressing F6 during setup. I did not have these problems because mine came setup with the PC.

Windows setup will recognize sata drives without installing the drivers. but it will treat them as IDE drives and they will only run at UDMA 5. I have TWO sata drives installed on my machine and I have never installed drivers for them.

on my Mobo which is an intel 875PBZ there are three settings in the bios one with IDE disabled then with SATA disabled then with BOTH Sata and IDE enabled.

I have SATA as well, but i'll take your word that I have never got "there is no drive connected to this machine" message and that I don't have to install the drivers it needs to see the drive

I checked back with my friend and he did not have to press F6 and install third party drivers. However, as I said, when he first tried to set it up he only saw 32GB, he downloaded tools from Seagate called “seatools” and he was able to set it up and format it for 160GB. However, Seagate loads a dynamic overlay from On-Track to allow older BIOS to interface with the drive. Using the “seatools” my friend was able to remove the On-Track stuff and then the BIOS saw 137 GB. He then installed WinXP Pro and it recognized the drive as 160GB. The BIOS also now recognized the drive as 160GB. He checked with Everest Home and found that the interface was a serial ATA/150. I guess what all this means is that you should use Seagate’s Tool Set to setup the drive before installing windows.

One thng I left out was that after he installed WinXP Pro he installed the Intel Chipset Utility to load the proper drivers.

Windows DOES NOT come with SATA drivers on the cd you have to install them during set up otherwise windows setup will NOT see the drive. The only way to skip installing the drivers through F6 is to add them to your own modified windows install cd

I understand what you are saying and that information is available from Seagate at

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/sata_detect.html

However, I also trust the info my friend gave me, because like me, he has both software and hardware advanced degrees in engineering and unlike me (I stayed mainly in R&D and mostly in hardware design and embedded processors), he has outstanding knowledge of computers and is one of the best softwar engineers I have ever met. On the other hand maybe he left out some information when we spoke about this problem.

yeah kelloggs give a lot of things away on the back of their boxes

Use the install cd or burn them to a cd.

I just added a sata drive to my dell 8400, and I had to go into the bios and tell it that I had a sata drive and which sata channel it was on, before it would recognize the drive.. After that, everything was cool...

You need to install Windows XP Service Pack 2, which will overcome this limitation of 32GB. Google for the words "slipstream xp service pack 2" for how to create a Windows XP SP2 native install CD. Don't use drive overlay software.