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LWD Staff Joined: 15 Feb 2002 Posts: 1300 Location: USA

Do I HAVE to press F6 when I install WinXP on sata? The reason I ask, is, I didn't. I have WinXP installed, activated, an updated to SP2, but I can't get XP to recognize my newly created partitions. Also, I have that little "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the lower right and it is representing my sata drive.

So do I have to start all over?

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 3:21 pm Post subject:

Greetings,

The only time you need to press F6 when installing Windows XP is if you are installing Windows XP on a hard drive that is attached to an additional adapter - like a SATA interface PCI card. If your motherboard has SATA connectors, you don't have to do a thing other than installing any chipset software provided by the mainboard maker after you install XP.

As to your icon of safely removing the hard drive, I have seen this on some computers and not on others. I suspect it has to do with the chipset on the motherboard as my Dell with SATA drives do not have this, yet my Media PC has - its an Asus board with the nVidia chipset.

You do not have to start over.

LWD Staff Joined: 15 Feb 2002 Posts: 1300 Location: USA

Well, that's good.
Except now i don't know what to do. I can't "see" my partitions in WinXP. I can "see" them in my Partition software (Paragon), and I clicked on Start/Settings/Control Panel/System/Hardware/Device Manager/ Disk Drives / Seagate drive, and then clicked on Populate Volumes and they show up there, but I still can't access them in My Computer.

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 3:55 pm Post subject:

Try Control Panel -> Admin Tools -> Computer Management. In the tree view on the left, look under Storage for Disk Management.

Do you see the SATA drive and partitions there? I'd recommend using that DM tool to create the partitions. In some cases Windows doesn't like partitions made by 3rd party apps, plus I *think* 3rd party apps can't create NTFS partitions.

LWD Staff Joined: 15 Feb 2002 Posts: 1300 Location: USA

They are all listed, and healthy.

I didn't have trouble with Paragon on my last Sata drive. I did have trouble with Partitionmagic, though.

My last sata drive had to use a pci controller since the hard drive didn't have them. But this hard drive does. So I figured I didn't need to press f6 when I setup WinXP.

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 4:09 pm Post subject:

Have they been assigned a drive letter?

LWD Staff Joined: 15 Feb 2002 Posts: 1300 Location: USA

Uh, no... Oops, am i supposed to do that?
So, all i have to do is right-click on it, and assign the letter in DM?

LWD Staff Joined: 15 Feb 2002 Posts: 1300 Location: USA

Ok, I'm set! Thanks! Don't you wish all problems were solved so easily? Laughing

Mutt Joined: 10 Apr 2002 Posts: 121 Location: USA

You also need to use the F6 option anytime you need to install RAID drivers.

The reason why you get the remove option in windows with some SATA drives and actually you should get it with all of them is becuase the SATA spec says the drives are hot swapable. So you can remove the device as if it were a USB drive and put a new one in. Of course this is how it recognized but of course cannot remove your OS drive since it will kill your pc.

So if you have more than one SATA drive and you plan on using this option then make sure you remove the right one. My motherboard has SATA connections on back so i can plug a SATA drive in and fill it with what ever than remove it without ever having to open the case.

Great feature. Now not all chipsets support the hot swap feature and that is why you see the remove option on some and not on the others. According to the SATA spec the drives are supposed to be how swap ready.

LWD Staff Joined: 15 Feb 2002 Posts: 1300 Location: USA

That's interesting about the swappability of sata drives, deagler. What kind of motherboard do you have?

Mutt Joined: 10 Apr 2002 Posts: 121 Location: USA

Well I have an Asus A8N SLI Deluxe but this in option with most new Asus boards.

Google the SATA spec it is there as a requirement for the hard drive companies to meet. Some of the companies do it well and some of them do not. It depends on how they ground the drives and of course your chipset must support this feature.

Intel chipsets do not have the feature by default except on higher end workstations. Many of the Intel boards you buy off the shelf will not have this feature even if the drives support this.

It can still work if the hard drive maker did a good job when they were meeting this spec.

I tested this funtionality for a year for various products for RAID recovery.