How I solved my serious SATA problem ...

[webcat]

For a lot of people, Sata drives seems to be a real headache when it comes to reinstall Windows XP. I'll try to describe my problem and the solution I've found thru a desperate trial that worked perfectly .

I've got an Intel D845PEBT2 MOBO bought in 2002 , 2 IDE drives , a Maxtor SATA and a WD SATA with no RAID . The project was to reinstall XP on an IDE drive after a reformat . I wanted to keep all the files on other HDs intact. I want to mention that my BIOS doesn't permit to enable or disable a SATA drive. As far as I know, I can only enable or disable RAID or SATA boot. No way to check active SATA drive in my BIOS, not at early installation stage anyway.

Now I installed XP on an IDE and of course SATA drives never appeared anywhere I could look for. I installed the SATA LINK controlers in the XP device manager screen and restarted . Of course, the SATA still stayed invisible . After many routine changes, shut downs, BIOS look out and retarts with no result , I began to search the web for a clue and I found out that I needed to load the driver with a floppy boot (DDO , something like that ). This is where my serious problem kicked in : for whatever reason since 2002, I was never ever able to have my floppy drive to work with my computer. Well...where to go and what to do ? I mean no floppy drive accessible for this fix , it's like trying to start a car that has no spark plugs... I tought that it was the end and that my HD would have to end up in a new system.

In my mind, there was only one thing left to try and it worked perfectly . I read about some users making hot swaps with their SATA drives. I shut the computer down, unpluged the power cable. took the cables out of both SATA drives completely and restarted the computer . Fine, a very normal boot with normal boot time. Then I performed a hot plugging... replugged the first SATA drive ( power cable first and next data cable , the red one ). My first SATA drive instantly appeared in Explorer. Next I plugged the second drive et voilà... back were all my files and directories on both drives , untouched !!! It took me 2 days to fix this one but I'm so glad I finally did it without a floppy boot . Flopy boots are probably used for installing Windows on a SATA drive anyway. Now I know how to proceed ... with my floppyless computer at least.