Does Vista install onto Serial ATA hard drives ?

311

Hello ,does anyone know of any issues of Vista not installing on SATA hard drives ,on laptops without floppy drives?
I can't install windows XP because of this issue and I'd hope buying vista would overcome this.

chopster

why would not having a floppy drive affect you installing xp ?

Both OS's install from from the dvd directly. Vista especially shouldn't have any issues with sata drives , early versions of XP alright you had to load in separate sata drivers during the install.

Other than that i don't see why you should any problems whatsoever.

311

I have xp sp2 ,it's a known issue on a google search .
There seems to be problems with vista aswell ,certain combinations of motherboards and harddrives won't let vista install.

I thought i could get some info off someone would has come accross this and how to get around it with vista.
I was going to buy a USB floppy drive ,but I wasn't sure it would be picked up when pressing F6 during a windows install.

swingking

I am installing vista, this very minute on to a sata drive, and so far I've had no problems.

8T8

Yes Vista does install on SATA hard drives.

Those issues you speak of may be from earlier beta versions as there where some problems back then.

Modern motherboards SATA controllers emulate a standard IDE device in bios so Windows only sees a normal drive no need for a driver.

For XP and first generation SATA controllers that did not have this emulation ability you did have to supply a driver for the controller. You may also have to supply a SATA driver is running from a SATA RAID array.

It is also possible to integrated a driver like a SATA controller into an XP install via a program called n-Lite then burn your own CD with the driver if you so desire. This removes the need to supply the driver at install so you can install on the target hardware.

astrofool

Vista lets you load drivers from CD or USB key, no floppy needed at all. (most often needed for add-on/raid controllers)

Stephen

You might encounter some awkward problems if you have a mixture of IDE and SATA drives, like me. Vista installed and all seemed well, until I removed the Vista DVD and rebooted. Then I just got "BOOTMGR is missing". I had installed Vista on a SATA drive but for some reason it seems to automatically stick the bootloader on the first IDE disk it finds, and my bios was trying to boot from the SATA disk.

311

Thanks for the replies .

tman

astrofool wrote:

Vista lets you load drivers from CD or USB key, no floppy needed at all. (most often needed for add-on/raid controllers)

Yep, I just threw the xp drivers for my onboard sata controller onto a usb key and pointed the intsallation towards that when it didn't pick up my sata drive. So much handier than XP's method (unless you use nlite as mentioned above...)
Installation was a cakewalk anyway, you shouldn't have any problems so long as you're prepared

311

I tried the usb key ,wasn't recognized . I boot up with the xp Cd and press f6 ,then choose to install raid ,then get Iastor.sys missing.

Hope vista has the power to handle my laptop when I try and install it.
I tried running the vista upgrade advisor ,it won't run .

8T8

Quick question but does the XP CD not recognise your built in IDE/SATA controller as that is rather unusual for a laptop you should not have to supply any driver at all.

As for Vista what are the specifications of the laptop primarily what matters most are CPU & RAM in general you will need 1GB of RAM to run Vista smoothly.

You need a DX9 GPU if you want to enable Aero Glass though this is not necessary Vista will run fine without it enabled just less eye candy.

311

I got xp to install last night ,the problem I was having was everytime I tried to install XP ,I'd get a screen saying IASTOR.SYS missing and that I've no floppy drive for the drivers needed and press any key to reboot.

Eventually I chose from the bios screen to boot from the CD ,it installed XP and I had no problems .
Thanks for the help ,

Brian.