Installing Vista On SATA Drive

Hi,

Last few months I installed Vista Ultimate on my new Seagate SATA II 500GB drive. The installation went smooth without any problem till today.

Last week, a friend of mine bought a new PC and tried to install XP on it. The PC of cource, run on SATA as well. He met with this problem that he cant seem to install due to problem with finding his hard disk. He asked me and I shared my experience with him, telling him that SATA does not require any special setting on the BIOS, it should autodetect and considering its a new pc it shouldnt be a problem at all.

Later, a friend of his told him that he needed to preload a SATA driver during installation. This baffles me and I did a search on google and now I found out about this SATA requirement that requires the user to load a driver during install so that VISTA/XP will be able to recognize the drive.

My question is, why in my case, I did not have to do this (load the driver)? My PC uses the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe mobo.

Thanks

Maybe because you have Vista and him XP?

Vista is more recent than XP and SATA has be created after initial XP.
May be a CD of XP with SP2 would work?

Your friend just need to download drivers from his mobo's manufacturer.
He may need to burn it on a CD if he don't have a Floppy.

I guess you meant "installing FROM an IDE Optical Drive"

If the BIOS see it, it should work?

Are you getting an error while booting?
Do you have the CD before the HD in the boot order?
You should see a message to press a key to boot from the CD?

I need more detail if you want me to try to help you...

I agree with Zoron I have installed vista and xp multiple times on both ide and sata drives with no issues to date in terms of detection. If they are not being recognized my guess with an ide drive would be perhaps you do not have the jumpers set correctly, with a sata drive there should be no issue as long as it is plugged in correctly.