XP install with no Floppy for SATA RAID drivers

This was done on a 2006 ish XP Home Dell Dimension 9150 with SATA and an onboard RAID controller.  All I wanted to do was reinstall XP Home on to a single SATA drive.  A standard XP boot cd wants  you to load SATA drivers off a floppy and that is a giant pain if you don’t have a floppy installed.  If you do not, basically the computer boots off the CD, then gets to set up and tells you to push F3 because NO DRIVE WAS FOUND.  I double and triple checked, used multiple drives and other means like the BIOS, and a Hiren’s CD verified that the SATA drive was correctly installed. 

 

Bottom line, the SATA drivers needed to be loaded into the XP CD.  A free program call nLite allows you to add the SATA drivers that you can download from a different PC and add them to the XP install CD.

 

http://paparadit.blogspot.com/2007/06/installing-sata-hard-drive-with-windows.html

 

Here is a link to download n-lite   , also for Wizards it’s in the utilities folder in out online directory, I’m being sly here as to not make our directory public.

http://www.nliteos.com/download.html

 

I added the SATA drivers, integrated them into the XP boot CD and did nothing more than boot off the modified XP Home CD and now I’m in business!

 

Kurt Rein
Mobile Computer Wizard
858 345-0382 Cel
619 255-1215 Office
www.mobilecomputerwizard.com