Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[Gallienus]

Have an Asus motherboard w/ a Maxtor (Seagate) boot hard drive.  Have a Linux partition which which boots fine.  Am trying to install Windows to a 141 GB Fat32 partition.  Windows does not see any Hard drive.

Asus provides a file JmicronXXXX.zip which creates a folder called floppy64. This can be copied to a floppy disk which will supposedly load an additional driver during the Windows install.  During the Windows install I hit F6 for additional drivers and put in the floppy.  It then finds a big list of 20 JMicron JMB RAID or AHCI controllers.  No matter which I select, none cause the hard drive to be recognised during the Windows install.

I guess there are no unified SATA hard drive controllers?  Every single motherboard is different?

[hpholm]

The AHCI drivers on the floppy disk may not be designed for XP, but for Vista - in that case you need to enable the "compatible" or "IDE-mode" setting for the S-ATA drive in the computers BIOS and install XP with it's built-in drivers.

- On a friends computer, we had to temporarily remove 2 P-ATA drives during install of (32-bit) Windows XP, for Windows to see the S-ATA disk. Just a wild and final guess before giving up, but it worked.

Best regards

Hans

[Gallienus]

Hi,

Thanks for the help.  The computer currently runs expensive engineering simulations under RH Linux v4, 64bit.  Thus I do not want to lose the Linux OS which boots fine so as to perhaps get Windows to work.  Linux thought to provide Sata drivers on the install disks.

Also there is a slave IDE drive: I may try to install Windows to this and then use the system tools to load the SATA drivers under Windows and see the SATA fat32 partition.  I think the Linux bootloader can be made to point to the slave HDD?

Yours,

John

[hpholm]

There are no ill effects on my installation of a 64-bit Ubuntu, when switching the drive configuration from AHCI to IDE mode in BIOS on an Intel DP965LT motherboard. The IDE option enables Windows XP to recognise the drive without additional drivers.

A few more things to bear in mind, in random order:

Windows needs a primary partition to boot from. You can install most of Windows on an extended partition, but it still needs to place a few files on a primary partition.

1 physical drive can hold up to 4 primary partitions.

XP first edition can use up to 137GB hard drive space. XP SP1 and later has other and larger limitations.

Windows does not like FAT-32 partitions larger than 32GB

Linux can be made to read and write NTFS (if it doesn't already?)

You have started in the correct order, installing Linux first!

Linux boot loader can be customized with an option to start Windows.

--

Hans

[Gallienus]

Thanks to your info apparently there is an unsupported module to read NTFS partitions under Linux.  Thus I'll format my Slave IDE NTFS and install WinXP64 there.  The Linux bootloader is highly configurable and can point to a slave drive.

I'll just add another Linux partition to the SATA drive & keep the IDE drive all  NTFS. Will advise if this works.