SATA driver probs - I think!

[puppet]

I had xp sp2 running on my PC with two ide hard drives. One of them was slowly failing (giving s.m.a.r.t errors on boot). I bought a new SATA drive and connected to the sata controller booted to pc dos and ghosted my system drive onto it. Played with BIOS to boot to SATA drive with my ide drive as my new data drive. Everything works fine - windows boots quickly and I can log in quickly but once in I cant do anything for over a minute! I can do a little but nothing really. On opening win explorer straight after logon I get a searching icon (the one with the little torch...) and it takes well over a minute to give me a drive list in the explorer bar!

In device manager there are no little yellow exclaimation marks but also there is nothing referencing SATA. I have IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers with 6 controllers lisetd (incl primary and secondary channels. Also on boot the drive is listed as an IDE drive. Should I be worried about any of this? Do I need to load SATA drivers somehow?

Any help or ideas greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Mark

 

[wolluf]

I'm surprised its booting at all without SATA drivers - but yes, I'd download then from mobo site (or get them off mobo CD - but web versions probably newer) & install them immediately!

PS - is there anything under SCSI and RAID controllers in Device Manager (SATA devices under there)?

PPS - the remaining IDE drive doesn't have XP installed on it? (ie, you are sure its booting from SATA drive)

 

[puppet]

Nope nothing under SCSI or RAID controllers and nope XP not on other ide disk anymore - 100% certain that I'm booting to SATA disk.

Not sure how I install the SATA drivers - there is nothing saying SATA controller or anything like that....

Thank you for your help.

Mark

 

[wolluf]

don't the driver's come with an install app?

If not, start the add hardware wizard - assuming it doesn't find the SATA drive as new device - choose add new hardware device. Then take all the 'manual options' - pick SCSI & RAID device, including 'have disk' - and then point the browse from there to where the SATA drivers are on your drive. It should then install them - hopefully it will then use them, which should improve matters (but must admit as its not found the SATA device before....).

Alternatively, you could do a repair reinstall -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341.

At the start of this, when it prompts you to press F6 if you have SCSI drivers, do so - and when prompted supply a floppy disk which you've written your SATA drivers to. The reinstall should then use these drivers - and hopefully when complete all will be well (you'll need to reapply service pack if install disk is lower level than installation & visit windows updates afterwards, but everything else should be as was).