Originally Posted by debro

No hard drives ever require drivers.
HOWEVER ...... SATA controllers always require drivers to be loaded from floppy for installation of WinXP. WinXP came out 4 years ago, well before SATA was commonplace, hence has no native SATA drivers embedded.

I'd suggest for future ease .. buy a USB floppy drive, they are dirt cheap, simple to use & you can pick them up for about $20us.

The other option, which I do not recommend, is to slipstream the Sata controllers drivers onto a winxp installation cd, which will mean you won't need the floppy drive.

But seriously, buy the USB floppy drive.

PCI->Sata cards are commonplace. If you pay more than $25us / $45au, then you are being overcharged.
I've recently paid $65au for a card which had firewire, usb2 & sata on it (for a celeron 300 machine).


Don't worry too much though.
If you don't follow anyones advice here, the following will happen:

1) Boot screen appears
2) Sata controller initiliases, detects and lists the HD.
3) Windows XP setup doesn't detect the SATA controller and hence doesn't detect the hard disk.
4) WinXP Setup resets the computer.

Originally Posted by Xabi

This is the details of my motherboard:
I have the 645E Max-U: http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p...del=645E_Max-U