SATA Driver and XP partition questions

I took my Toshiba laptop (A200 26Q) in to a computer shop to get a partition made and to get XP loaded in the partition (it came preloaded with Vista). The shop have told me that they can't do this as the machine has a SATA drive. I have all the XP drivers which I downloaded from the Toshiba website. I don't have a floppy drive.

1) Is the SATA driver the one they call Storage Manager? If not, what should I be looking for?

2) After the shop said they couldn't do the partition, I decided to try myself (using a slipstreamed disk) so I bought the copy of XP they were going to use. When I got home I saw that it was XP Home OEM version. Is XP Home ok or should I insist on Pro? And can I use the OEM version to create a boot partition?

 

You know that you will have to slipstream the SATA drivers using nLite or something onto your XP disc right? Store Manager is the correct name for RAID/ATA drivers from Intel.

You will have to partition your drive prior to installing XP, since the XP installation disc does not have built in HD partition software.
Booting will be automatically sorted our provided you have partitioned your HD and installed in the correct partition.

 

Thank you. I have the partition and I have nLite. I just need the correct SATA driver and don't want to make a mistake.

If I slipstream it with the SATA drivers, will XP be able to find the drivers by itself? Even if I don't have a floppy drive?

What about the XP Home vs Pro issue?

Thanks again for the help!

 

If you use nLite and follow its instructions, you will be able to install XP without a floppy drive, although you might have to burn a new disc.

The home v pro would depend more on what you are planning to use your XP partition for.

 

I am still not sure how to find the correct SATA driver. How do I find out what the exact model of the drive is?

 

it's not the drive you have to worry about. It's the SATA controller driver (your motherboard chipset driver).

 

You can slipstream as many drivers as you like onto the CD. XP will then just pick the one that matches the detected hardware. In effect, it's just like the thousands of drivers that are *already* on the install CD. So if you're in doubt about which driver to add to the CD, just add them all.
And no, you don't need a floppy drive if you slipstream. As I said, you're simply adding new drivers to the install CD, so it doesn't need a floppy with extra drivers.

And as said above, you don't need a driver for your harddrive. Just for the motherboard's SATA controller.

The differences between Home and Pro aren't that great. Pro has a few more administrative tools (event log, defragger, disk/partition management and a bunch of others. I can't remember which ones Home have. But for the ones that are missing, you can generally find superior third-party applications anyway.

The main difference between OEM and others is that OEM is tied to some hardware. That is, you're not allowed to install it on other computers.
It also might complain a bit more if you reinstall often.

 

Thank you so much for all the info!

Do you know what sort of format the motherboard's SATA controller will be in? Basically, what should I be looking for? I have a chipset driver and I have storage manager driver, but not sure if this is the driver I require. What I am aksing is will it be a string of numbers, or a name of a manufacturer, etc? I am not sure how to find out what the exact hdd is. In a desktop you can just open the case, but I have a laptop.

 

You don't need this info, windows installer is choosing for you. You just load the inf file in nLite, and since you don't know which driver is you choose em all. Windows installer will load all of them and use automatically the correct one.

 

I am not explaining myself well. Sorry. I have downloaded all the XP drivers I could find from Toshiba's site, but I am not sure if one of those is the SATA HDD controller/driver. I don't know how to make sure this particular thing is there.

I know, really thick question, but I hope someone can help anyway!