SATA storage drive

[Kaz888]

Have bought Maxtor 160GB SATA drive for additional storage on WinXP PC.

SATA is enabled in BIOS. Motherboard is P4TSP-D2

Do I still need to install SATA drivers if there is no operating system on it? If so, how? since I am not installing XP, and all posts I have found say "F6 during install".

Strange thing is:
Can see it in Device Manager and Disk Management.

Tried to format drive to NTFS a couple times using Disk Management. It gets to the end and says "Windows could not complete formatting", and then it is no longer visible anywhere.

After reboot, disk is visible again in Device Manager and Disk Management.

 

[Essbee]

If you're ading it as an additional drive, you wont need drivers. Windows will see it as another disk - SATA is just a different type of interface (as opposed to IDE). The F6 command you reference is to do with RAID arrays - you only need to install drivers if the disk ia part of a RAID array - from what you said in your post, it isn't.

As to you problem formatting it, i am not sure. There should be no problems with Disk Manager formatting it. Have you checked cable connections or Maxtors diagnostics DOS apps? Have you googled for any other references to your problem?

What service pack of XP do you have - i seem to remember that if you dont have SP1 or above, Windows has problems with any disks above 137Gb.

Steve

 

[Kaz888]

Thanks for the response Steve
I gave up in the end and took it to a nearby computer tech.
He uninstalled the MaxBlast software and the disk was able to be formatted.

A question box did come up (when I first booted) about needing Windows to recognize a disk larger than 137Gb.
The disk was visible as 149Gb in My Computer, so I know that was OK.