Tips Assembling New PC with SATA & Win XP

Installing Windows XP into the SATA Harddisk drive for a newbies is not an easy task to be carried out without "Know How" technical knowledge. Even me considered an intermediate user takes some time to figure out how "on earth" to do so.

Assemblying a new PC already took me 2 hours as I have to assembly all the parts & components on the tiny compact Power Logic Mini ATX Casing.

For this purpose, I bought a Western Digital SATA II 120GB (WD1200JS) Harddisk drive during the PC Fair 2005 at Kuala Lumpur Convention Center (KLCC) recently (Dec 02-04, 2005). The CPU of choice would be definitely AMD Sempron 64Bit 2800+ coupled with ASUS Mirco ATX Mobo, ATI Radeon 9200 Series & Kingston 512MB DDR 400 and of course al-cheapo DVD Combo Optical Drive from Lite-On.

The trickiest part was installing Windows XP as the SATA Harddisk cannot be detected by the OS. What I did was by creating a secondary driver on the single floppy diskette with the driver downloaded from Via website. Yes, the Mobo is driven by the Via VT8237 Southbridge Chipset.

The driver required to be written on the floppy disk:

Chipset : VT8237 Southbridge
Manufacturer: VIA
OS : DOS
Driver Name : VT8237 Integrated Serial ATA RAID controller ( )
Driver :
Version : 410a
Driver Date : 07 February 2005

Now, extract all the contents from the folder DriverDisk (TXTSETUP.OEM, PIDE Folder, RAID Folder) and save it on a diskette. If you are using different Southbridge chipset such as SIS or ALi, the drivers name & files would remains the same except different binary codes to match the chipset manufacturer ~ no need to bother to know though.

Next, I boot up the PC with DVD drive as the first bootable media & followed by the Western SATA Harddisk. The PC booting as usual accessing the Windows XP CD and I pressed the function key F6 to install the 3rd party driver for the RAID. Windows XP always point to the floppy drive as the removable source media default.

Select the appropriate RAID SATA driver once the selection menu displayed. In my case, RAID for Windows XP. Then proceed as usual without ejecting the floppy disk until you are told to do so by the Windows XP installation message. The rest was continued as normal installation.

Actually there are another alternative solution for you to get the same result without using the floppy drive as I tried ealier on but to no avail after several attempts.

You may try using an USB Flash Drive and enabled the BIOS system earlier to read the media in DOS mode by enabling Floppy Emulation. Copy the same contents as explained earlier using the floppy disk. The procedure remains indentical.

However, for my situation Windows XP unable to read the USB Flash Drive during the second stage of reading the RAID driver. It was always searching & displaying a message that the Floppy Disk drive is not found. Yes, true...I intentionally disconnected the drive & disabled in the BIOS earlier in order to bypass this procedure. I've chosen this method as the new PC wasn't installed with the Floppy drive (as it becoming obsolete & useless in most cases anyhow / sooner or later).

There is another extreme method to accomplish the same objective. By creating a new bootable Windows XP CD but with some modification on the configuration & believe me, it is totally very technical. Because you need to add the RAID driver as an additional drivers as already available on the original Windows XP CD. You need to know the boot sector address & so forth. By creating the CD, you dont't need to use any floppy disk or USB Flash Drive anymore. Anyhow, I'll post it next time with step by step as I gathered from some magazines, internet & forums if you feel interested to know. Just email me then ....

Good Luck!