It's been about 4 years since I built my last PC which had all IDE optical and hard drives. I have ordered the parts for my new PC build which will be based on an an Intel DP35DP motherboard
http://download.intel.com/support/ [...] 201_en.pdf

I have decided to upgrade to all SATA drives and have ordered a new SATA II hard drive and optical DVD drive.

I'll be running a single 500GB SATA II hard drive i.e. no RAID.

I'll be doing a clean install of Windows XP SP2 on the new PC. From what I've read, XP doesn't have native SATA II support so I'll need to load the drivers during install from a floppy.

My problem is that the new motherboard does not have a floppy connector/controller so I have no idea how I am going to load these drivers. I could borrow a USB floppy drive from a friend but from what I've read this isn't necessarily supported by the Windows XP installer.

Actually, I'm not 100% sure if I need to load the SATA drivers at all for a single drive or if this is only if I was going to set up a multi-drive RAID configuration.

In other words, I'm a bit confused.

Also - I am going to be installing XP from the optical SATA II DVD drive. Is this also going to present a problem?

Thanks in advance.

AL

The trick you are going to run into is whether or not the motherboard will map the USB floppy as if it were a native floppy.

If your motherboard can boot off of the floppy and it maps the floppy into the motherboard controller as if it were plugged into and Floppy channel, you will be fine. Otherwise I would find yourself a nice IDE drive to install the OS on or you'll beat yourself to death figuring it out.

Vista can load drivers from any type of media, it is where the solution to this problem was addressed.

Surprising enough though, the Optical SATA drives don't seem to have very many issues. If they do IDE mapping, like my ASUS board is doing they run just fine and I have reloaded XP on my machine may times using my optical SATA drive.

Good luck, let me know how it goes.

On the newer boards booting to sata is a non issue,no f6 driver required.

Some boards are picky on which sata connector the boot drive is plugged into though,usually its #1.

Not always I would still have that floppy handy if you need it.

Do you have XP with SP2? If not, will have a main partition of 128 Gb but SATA should be recognize by default.

i got the same problem as alpenn, its a kind of stupid for intel to give a sata/raid driver update on a floppy disk for this motherboard DP35DP for which it doesnt have any Floopy drive or IDE connector on it. And the other this is it said that its compatible with XP where XP only loads drivers through a floppy disk!

So, if i dont buy a Vista, thats it! this motherboard is useless!!!

All my builds have required the F6 boot thing with floppy. I keep one handy for this purpose just laying it on the bench and connecting the cables and not installing it.

Add $5 to you budget and buy one.

Or add a floppy / card reader to a permanent build.

I've loaded XP onto single SATA hard drives any number of times, most recently last week. No floppy or extra drivers should be needed. Since you are using SP2, the entire capacity of the drive should be recognized.

I think I'm able to contribute.

Under bios it is very probable that you'll find three options for the SATA controller: Compatible (witch will work flawlessly [no F6] but you won't have hotplugh and NCQ), AHCI (you'll need a floppy or a windows XP installation CD with drivers included) and RAID (The same as AHCI but with the RAID software/firmware loaded)

In the latter two options you'll need a floppy (luck with the USB reader ) or a Windows XP modded CD. I've tried a tool called nLite wich may help you. You copy the contents of your WXP CD to a folder, ask it to add the drivers you downloaded from the MoBo manufacturer website and it will include them. It is even able to create an iso or record directly a new CD.
When booting with the modded CD, you will not have to press F6 anymore and you'll have a dedicated WXP CD for that motherboard. Then you'll be able to eventually forget about floppies...

Hope I've explained it well.

It isn't a consistent thing, and what 'should' happen isn't always what happens, depending on the persons skill level and what the motherboard manfacturer did with their board.

So the reason for recommending the floppy and the drivers is to make sure that all the tools are on hand for the case that, if it comes up, SP2's post install doesn't detect the SATA controller properly, even though it is supposed to.

It's been my very recent (last 2 weeks worth of free time) experience that not always does an XP SP2 install find the full drive space (running WDCaviar 500GB SATA). Is there any decent way to have the mobo find the USB and load drivers through that during Windows install (I'm missing the trick or it just won't do it)?

Can be found here

32-bit

64-bit

Thanks for all your replies on this. I've decided to pick up an OEM version of Vista Home Premium to install on the new PC. This way I can load the RAID/SATA drivers off a CD.
I also decided to buy a 22" new monitor, new case, new wireless keyboard and mouse and a dual tuner PVR card as well so it's turned from a bit of a budget incremental upgrade into a whole new PC.
I'm looking forward to getting this thing up and running. I have everything sitting there ready to go except for the CPU. I'm waiting on the E6850 to be available for purchase. Only another 3 weeks ... it's going to seem a lot longer though.