Installing XP on an SATA drive (200GB Maxtor DiamondMax on MSI KT6V/VIA 8237)

Posted:

30 Dec 2007
at 8:47pm

Tags:

Apparently this is the only blog entry from my old site that was missed - so here it is again!

Given the amount of looking around I had to do to find out the correct sequence of events to get XP installed on a 200GB SATA drive, I thought I'd post the steps I've taken to get it on there.

All in all it went pretty flawlessly, but I don't know if that's a factor of the amount of research I did beforehand on the correct steps. So on to what I did:

  • Installed the drive in to the cage and plugged in the red SATA cable that came with the motherboard (MSI KT6V) and the power connector that came directly from my new power supply. I also disconnected my existing PATA drive (Western Digital WD800JB, 80GB/8MB Cache)
  • Went in to the BIOS settings and ensured that the boot order was CDROM, BBS-0 (why BBS I'll never know, but my Maxtor disk appeared there).
  • Put in a MaxBlast3 floppy disk (I tried using the bootable CD but I use a USB mouse and it wasn't happy for some reason) and formatted the new drive as one big 200GB NTFS partition (I do video editing using EditStudio and DVD-LAB so I prefer NTFS for big capture files)
  • Installed a slipstreamed SP2 verson of XP Pro (apparently you have to use at least an SP1 version of XP to install on to SATA properly - however I wasn't willing to take the time to test with and without)
  • At the appropriate time hit F6 to install a SCSI/RAID driver (SATA apparently appears as a SCSI disk) and put in the disk that came with my motherboard.
  • Chose to leave the filesystem intact and installed as per normal.
  • After booting in to Window for the first time I then installed the Maxtor Big Drive Enabler and everything seemed fine.
  • Since then I've rebooted lots of times and all seems fine (currently have about 20GB free after a large capture from Sky+ so I guess I'm past the 137GB limit :-) )
  • The only outstanding issue is that after reinstalling my WD drive, I can't boot in to Gentoo using XP's boot loader - only by using the F11 boot menu. For more information, see this Gentoo Forums Thread.

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Resume/CV aboutandy

I am a web developer creating sites for a number of clients through my company NextGen Development Ltd using PHP5 and MySQL. Recently I've been using/recommending the Symfony framework as it's an excellent solution for building websites that are robust and have a high level of functionality in a short timeframe.

I've been developing web applications since about 1996 (initially in Perl, then using PHP since 1999) for clients such as OXO, Fortnum & Mason and IPC Media Ltd. I've worked on over 400 sites over this period and am currently focusing most of my energy on a few important clients: IPC Media Ltd, Mansized and Pocket-Lint.

In my spare time I am a Kukki-Taekwondo 3rd Dan black belt, father to two young children and a husband to my darling wife. Then again, what is this spare time thing...?