Dell SATA Drive

[glenglenn]

I had a newer Dimension in the shop with XP loaded on a SATA drive. It had probs with the OS and I went the route of hitting F11 at the appropriate time and loaded the OS from the hidden partition.

Question: IF I had to load the OS onto a new replacement hard drive, can someone walk me through the process of finding/loading the SATA driver during Windows XP Setup, because otherwise the hard drive will not be found. Do you hit F6 during Setup loading and who provides the driver, the mobo manufacturer (Intel)? In this case, Dell does not supply any disks unless they are asked for during the purchase, so if the hard drive goes, and you don't want to fork over the 50 bucks or so for a set of disks and just want to load the OS without the Dell bloatware, what would you do?

[arch0nmyc0n]

well yeah f6 will bring you to the specify device screen.
You will need to locate drivers for your sata controller, and the manufacturers site should have them, but if not try the chipset's site, and if not try the website for the controller itself. If they're all Intel, YAY!
If I was really curious, I'd attach another drive and try it now, BEFORE the other drive dies, just so I know how to do it when it's gonna happen.

[tommo666]

If it's a Dell system, go to the support site enter the service tag (serial)then go to the downloads and all drivers for that system are listed by category. Get the ones you need.

http://support.dell.com - US

Http://support.euro.dell.com - EMEA

[glenglenn]

Thanks, Guys!