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How to install a driver in XP Setup without a floppy drive ???

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Daleus:
Just to add some detail to this thread:

We have not switched to Vista, so the following applies to WinXP and only applies to SATA drives as far as I can tell.

Dell has started shipping their desktops with SATA AHCI enabled.  Previously, the default was SATA ATA.  The difference seems to the be that AHCI allows more efficiency for the drive as well as hot swap ability. Interestingly, what I was able to dig up suggests that in a lot of cases AHCI will actually degrade performance, but my impression was that the margin was very small.

Why does this make a difference?  Well, where I work we use Ghost to install preconfigured images to new computers.  With AHCI I was unable to boot from the Bart PE CD from which I run Ghost.  In fact, I couldn'ty even boot from the Dell provided Windows XP installation CD. Turns out, CD drives (even SATA) don't understand AHCI - or at least not yet. If you try, you'll get a BSOD!

The work around was to change the BIOS setting for drives to the ATA mode, just before creating the image, then resetting after image creation so that the machine can boot as normal.  When it's time to install a new image, the same thing - change to ATA mode before installing and then back to AHCI just before booting the newly setup computer.

What happens if you don't reset to AHCI before rebooting?  BSOD! This will not occur on Windows Vista systems.  Vista *includes* AHCI drivers by default, whereas WinXP does *not*.

Final word -  I was unable to observe any functional differences between the computers operation when in AHCI vs. ATA mode.

YMMV

Cheers!

Carol Haynes:
Thanks thats a useful summary.

I too was trying to use a vendor (Belinea in this case)  supplied OEM Windows XP Pro SP2 CDROM. Beats me how any company can send out an installation disc that won't work on their machines - even when the system spec supports it and has it as a preinstalled option. Unfortunately my BIOS won't let me change anything much - most stuff is locked or invisible. I suppose I could look for an Intel BIOS for the notebook motherboard but I guess the OEM activation would then fail - and anyway I don't know if the mobo has been modded in any way.

Having said that Acronis True Image Echo Workstation works fine with this mobo in windows XP and Vista and the rescue disk boots and finds the SATA AHCI disc OK without having to change any settings. This would therefore make a viable easy alternative to Ghost if you want to migrate.

Acronis Disc Director Suite works OK too in Windows but only boots from the safe version from the rescue disc - otherwise it reports it can't find a hard disc.

Deozaan:
I had this same problem two years ago when I got my new computer and decided not to include the ancient floppy drive. My PC wouldn't recognize my SATA drives without a floppy.

It was suggested to me back then to use nlite but after several ISO burns that led to BSODs during installation or immediately upon booting Windows for the first time, I declared it a failure.

But I'd love to get it to work. Should I ever need to reinstall Windows XP on that machine, I'll be very, very unhappy.

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