ssd & xp...

so i have a supertalent 120gb ssd.. installed and fixed up a vista ultimate 64 bit installation...

ok... when i created the vista ultimate installation i made 3 partitions. 80gb, 20gb, 15gb. (approx)

so i took a xp home edition disk out and tried to install xp on the 20gb partition, and it gave me an error message saying "no hard disk drives found"....

can you only install xp on a hard DISK drive?!? :-/ SSD doesnt work? :-(

 

What notebook are you installing this on? Most likely what you are running into is that the SATA drivers for the hard drive are not supported natively with the XP Home CD. Ya know when it first boots up to go and install, its says Press F6 to add any 3rd party drivers..... thats what you need to do. The problem is, on a laptop unless you have a floppy drive (or a USB Floppy drive), this will not work as the F6 prompt only works with a floppy disk that shows up as drive A:

The other option is to use a program called nLite to slipstream the SATA drivers into the XP Home CD.... and make a new bootable CD using your CD Burner and then install from that. There are instructions all over the web. Just search for Windows XP, nLite, and Drivers.

BTW.... you can't/shouldn't install XP after you install vista. You usually need to do XP, then Vista, and if you choose to... then linux. in that order.

Older Windows OS first, then the next newest, etc... followed by linux.

 

And when I say SATA drivers for the hard drive... I do not specifically mean drivers for the SSD disk.. I'm talking about the SATA Controller itself. If its alot of work, you may look in the bios and maybe turn off the AHCI option for the SATA controller (sometimes called Compatibility mode) which then treats your SATA drive as an older IDE drive which everything has support for. Its always an option.

 

I have a 120 gb SSD from Supertalent and I installed XP on it just fine.

 

Good Job ChevyNovaln!!

Your exactly right. the drive is not being recognized because the Matrix Controller is not installed (AHCI) which enables the bios to recognize the ssd.

With XP, it has to be slipstreamed before or during the installation, a bit more difficult than Vista.

 

Ya got that right. I was very happy when I saw that not only did Vista give you a graphical way to apply drivers ahead of time, it detected things on the fly. Flash drives with drivers, CD's, etc..

XP only lets you use a floppy disk which I always thought was ridiculous, but hey... its old.

 

howdoi go about doing that? :-/ i have an m15x atm i dont think i instelld ahci for vista either

 

you wouldn't have had to on Vista. Most controllers are still automatically detected by Vista. XP doesn't play nearly as nicely as the hardware/AHCI controller was made after XP was created.

This article is the one I followed. This requires the XP CD (copied to a folder on your PC), the SATA drivers extracted to a folder, nLite (download it), and then follow the instructions.

http://maxeasyguide.blogspot.com/2008/04/preparations-for-winxp-installation-cd.html

 

Its actually XP that it enables to recognize the SATA HDD, the BIOS detects them just fine, otherwise, even Vista wouldn't install.

 

Correct... the bios detects them. However, the bios is most likely set to have the SATA controller in AHCI mode, which requires special drivers to be loaded when using Windows XP. The drive exists, but XP can't see it. If you turn the AHCI option off (same as setting Compatability mode on some models), the hard drive... although still being detected in the bios, now shows up as an IDE drive which is supported by all operating systems. No drivers necessary.

I believe you get a performance gain by leaving it in AHCI mode, so its better to slipstream the drivers into XP and then install it, however for many users that are not technically inclined, this can be a major undertaking. Disabling AHCI in the bios is actually the easiest option, but not my recommended option.

 

Hi all,

I was searching for a solution regarding SSD not recognized by Bios and came across this page. Here is my case I have a Clevo M665 SRU and a SATA SSD 32 GB (MLC) a friend brought from Japan (no name). the BIOS does not even detect it. Bios only sees the DVD writer. Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks

Alex