boot from sata / windows installation

[Doom9]

Does anybody have a SATA (Serial ATA) only system? I'm slowing but surely running out of HD space and I'd like to go next gen for my next HD. But I know that if you have a RAID controller, if you install windows you either need a floppy (only floppy works) with the RAID drivers so that you can access HDs connected to your RAID controller, or you have to install to a standard IDE HD. Since I don't have any floppy drive (and I'm most definitely not going to get one because Windows is too stupid to recognize any other device) I'd need to be able to install Windows on a HD that is connected to a SATA controller (and later boot from it). Does anybody know if this is possible?

[Ramirez]

I think this can be done in two ways (probably there are more)

1.Unattended Installation of Third Party Mass Storage Drivers (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;288344) (quite a headache, but hey..)
More on this here. (http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=1089640)

2. Plug your SATA drive into the IDE port using SATA>IDE converter, install winxp/2k as usual,
install RAID controller drivers and then connect it back into the SATA port. ()

Not too elegant but it's works.

HTH

[Doom9]

thanks for those links. A pain in the ass but it's doable.

@billyg: move on and think about people who don't want stinking floppies. Your office software creates documents that scream for something with more storage capacity, so it was you in the first place that made us move away from floppies.