SATA Troubleshooter - Windows 2000/XP Installation Basics

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Windows XP/2000 Installation Basics
Below you will find an outline of the steps for installing a new Serial ATA hard drive with Windows XP/2000. If there is already a booting hard drive and this drive will be installed as a non-booting storage drive, please see the lower section of this page.

Install Windows XP/2000 on a Blank SATA Hard Drive
Insert the Windows XP/2000 CD/DVD into the CD/DVD drive.

1. 
   Power down the computer.
   
2. 
   Mount and connect the Serial ATA hard drive. See here for an interactive flash tutorial illustrating this.
   
3. 
   Power up the computer.
   
4. 
   For some add-in SATA controller cards, you will need to press the F6 key to install drivers as the Windows setup screen launches.
   You may never have noticed the "F6" option before, since it happens at the bottom of the screen and is visible for only a few seconds during a standard install. What you most likely encountered during the setup process was a screen which came up informing you Setup could not find any drives installed on your computer, and it could not continue, much like the screen sample below:
   (Click to expand)
   
   
   
5. 
   To be able to hit the F6 button, you must restart the Setup process, and watch the bottom of the screen after pressing Enter on the "Welcome to Setup" screen. There will be some moments of files being loaded, and then you should see a message appear which says "Press F6 if you need to install a 3rd party SCSI or RAID driver". This message will only stay on the screen for a couple of seconds, so press F6 as soon as you see it appear.
   (Click to expand)
   
   
   
6. 
   After this is done, you will see other messages appear, and it will act as though nothing is happening, but eventually a screen will appear which will allow you to install the drivers for the add-in SATA controller.
   The screen will look like the sample below:
   (Click to expand)
   
   
   
7. 
   After you press S, the driver install process will continue and the floppy diskettes will be needed. Further instructions will be furnished after the driver install process has ended.
   (Click to expand)
   
   
   
8. 
   Insert the floppy diskette containing the drivers for the add-in Serial ATA controller.
   
9. 
   Once the drivers are loaded, proceed with the normal Windows XP/2000 installation.
   

A few further notes on this:

Driver Installation Diskette
For the hard drive to be detected in a new installation, the drivers for the add-in SATA controller/motherboard must be loaded at the beginning of installation.
The drivers for the controller/motherboard can probably be found either on the CD that came with it or on the manufacturer’s website. Simply load the required drivers on the diskette and have it ready.

Further Information
Motherboards which incorporate Serial ATA connectors do not provide options for adjustment in the BIOS, and some do provide on/off activation, so you should not have to make changes in the BIOS if you are adding a drive.
If you are replacing your boot drive, you may have to change the "boot order" in the BIOS to boot from the Serial ATA controller (sometimes represented in the boot order as the drive model number and sometimes as SCSI). If your motherboard has onboard serial ATA connectors, you may be prompted to install the drivers for them when you installed the motherboard. If you didn't install them at the time of the motherboard installation, then you should be prompted during a "Plug and Play" process by your OS to provide drivers. We recommend going to the serial ATA controller manufacturer's website for the latest drivers. See a short list below

Install a New (Second) SATA Drive in an Existing Windows XP/2000 System
The following numbered list will serve as a summary, with more detailed instructions to follow with screenshots:
Power down the computer.

1. 
   Mount and connect the Serial ATA hard drive. See here for an interactive flash tutorial illustrating this.
   
2. 
   Power up the computer and boot into Windows XP/2000.
   
3. 
   Open Computer Management and select Disk Management.
   
4. 
   Initialize the drive.
   
5. 
   Partition the drive.
   
6. 
   Format the drive (Windows includes this in the partitioning process).
   
7. 
   Assign the drive letter (included in the formatting and partitioning process).
   
8. 
   Initiate changes and finish.
   

Opening Disk Management in XP

1. 
   Right-click on My Computer.
   
2. 
   Choose Manage (this will open the Computer Management window).
   
3. 
   Choose Disk Management under the Storage category (Refer to Figure 1).
   

Figure 1 (Click to expand image.)

When the blank drive is first seen by Disk Management it will not be seen in Windows Explorer as a drive letter. To get it seen in Windows Explorer as a drive letter, the drive will need to be configured through Disk Management. Windows XP/2000 will normally see the unpartitioned drive when you open Disk Management and start the wizard for you.

Note the Unallocated Drive in Figure 2 below.
At this point Windows will normally launch a wizard to walk you through setting up the drive, but it may be necessary to set it up manually.

Figure 2 (Click to expand image.)

Manually Initialize/Write a Drive Signature
Right-click the new drive to initialize it (refer to Figure 3). This prepares the drive to be used with Windows.

1. 
   Note: Windows XP usually uses the term "Initialize", while Windows 2000 usually uses the term "Write a Drive Signature". The procedure is the same for both.
   
2. 
   Once you choose Initialize, another window will come up asking you to confirm which drive to initialize.
   Warning: Once a drive is initialized the data on the drive will be erased.
   Figure 3 (Click to expand image.)
   
   
   
3. 
   Choose the correct drive. Windows will usually only display uninitialized drives, but if you have a dual boot system, drives from other operating systems will show up in this list.
   
4. 
   Once you choose OK the drive will be initialized for use with Windows XP/2000 (though it still will not be seen by Windows Explorer).
   

Figure 4 (Click to expand image.)

The Partition/Conversion Wizard Method
Select the drive to partition. The new drive will probably be Disk 1 or Disk 2 or something similar.

1. 
   Select the drive to Convert (not needed for new drives).
   
2. 
   A summary screen will tell what the wizard will do if you press finish. Confirm that the correct drive is selected.
   
3. 
   Once you press Finish the drive will be initialized and you will be taken to the Partition Wizard. See Figure 5 for details.
   

Figure 5 (Click to expand image.)

Partition
Once a drive is initialized for use with XP, a partition option becomes available (Refer to Figure 6). This option is not available for drives that do not have free space or for drives that have not been initialized.
Windows XP supports FAT 16 partitions limited to 4 GB (Limited to 2 GB in DOS based operating systems like Windows 9X/Me), FAT 32 partitions which can be created up to 32 GB (They can be larger if they were made with Windows 98/Me), and NTFS partitions.

Figure 6 (Click to expand image.)

Partition Wizard

1. 
   Summary Screen
   
2. 
   Partition type:
   Primary – This is the normal selection for drives with less than 4 partitions.
   Extended – This is used if the drive is split in to 4 or more partitions.
   
3. 
   Specify partition size in Megabytes -
   Set the size of the partition (the full drive capacity is the default).
   If the full partition size is not used, right click on the remaining free space once the wizard has completed to partition that space. Repeat the partition wizard until the drive is how you want it.
   
4. 
   Assign the drive letter
   - This allows you to select the drive letter for this partition. If the partition is NTFS, you can mount the drive as a subfolder of an existing NTFS partition. If you want the drive to be D: and it is taken by a CD/DVD drive, you must first change the CD/DVD drive letter and then restart the partition wizard.
   
5. 
   Format Partition
   - If you choose not to format then you can format later by right clicking on the drive and choosing format. You can choose to format with a file type and allocation unit size. NTFS is the default format type in Windows XP, but FAT32 is popular for users that dual boot between XP/2000 and 9X. XP/2000 is limited in that it cannot create a FAT32 partition larger than 32 GB. However you can use DiscWizard or Windows 98/Me to create a larger partition and use it under Windows XP/2000.
   Some related notes:
   Allocation units are usually left at the default unless you know specifically what you want to do with the system. If you are doing video and audio, they tend to use large allocation units, because it improves performance with large files, but if you have a lot of small files then those files take up more space on the hard drive. For example, if you set the allocation unit size to 64k, any file, even a 1k file, will use 64k of drive space. Quick format will quickly format the drive, but it skips several verification processes.
   
6. 
   Summary – Allows you one more chance before committing to the changes (Refer to figures 7 and 8).
   

Figure 7 (Click to expand image.)

Figure 8 (Click to expand image.)

Finished
Once the drive has been initialized, partitioned, and formatted it will display as a healthy drive with the size and type of partition below the volume name and drive letter.
It will also appear in My Computer/Windows Explorer as a drive letter (E:, F:, etc), ready to use.
Please see more information on this final process on this Microsoft Support article.

A Note on Jumpers and Cabling
Serial ATA interface disk drives are designed for easy installation. It is not necessary to set any jumpers, terminators, or other settings on this drive for proper operation. The jumper block adjacent to the SATA interface connector on SATA 150MB/s drives is for factory use only. The jumper block adjacent to the SATA interface connector on SATA 300MB/s drives can be used to force the drive into SATA 150MB/s mode for use with older SATA controllers that only work with SATA 150MB/s drives.
With a Serial ATA interface, each disk drive has its own cable that connects directly to a Serial ATA host adapter or a Serial ATA port on your motherboard. Unlike Parallel ATA, there is no master-slave relationship between drives that use a Serial ATA interface.
You can use a Serial ATA drive in the same system with Parallel ATA drives as long as both interfaces are supported on the motherboard or with an add-in host adapter. This makes it easy to add Serial ATA compatibility to your existing system without removing existing Parallel ATA disk drives.

Driver Installation Diskette
For the hard drive to be detected in a new installation, the drivers for the add-in SATA controller/motherboard must be loaded at the beginning of installation. The drivers for the controller/motherboard can probably be found either on the CD that came with it or on the manufacturer’s website. Simply load the required drivers on the diskette and have it ready.