We’ve read the emails about the idiots who call tech lines for support, and can’t find the any key, or have broken the cup holder. So I thought great, they’ll love me, I’m not an idiot, and know a few things about IT.
My initial problem was getting XP home edition to work with my SATA drives. This turned out to be me not loading the correct drivers when booting from the CD (at the press F6 prompt). I called Microsoft support for this (I had to call the States becuse the UK office is only open from 9-5, now in my book if your buying a £180 OS you’ve probably got a job, but I digress). After 1/2 an hour on the phone to someone who barely spoke English, I was told that XP does not support SATA drives.
It does, because it’s working now, and allowing me to type this, however I’ve got 2 identical SATA drives, the BIOS seems to recognise this. But XP only recognises the one that it is installed on.
I think that this might be because the 2nd SATA drive is formatted FAT32, but my C drive is NTFS.
How did you format the second drive? Assuming you didn’t do it from within XP, right-click on My Computer and select Manage. Under Storage select Disk Management. Do you see the disk there? What does it say about it?
I suppose that in theory XP does not actually include SATA drivers in the sense that they do IDE controller drivers.
I found this statement at thispage
“Out of the box, no current Windows version, including Windows Server 2003, supports SATA drives. However, just as you can add a SCSI controller to Windows, you just need to add the correct SATA driver that ships with the motherboard or SATA host adapter. After you’ve installed the driver, Windows will be able to see the SATA controller and any attached devices. For more information about SATA, visit the SATA Working Group Web site at http://www.serialata.org.”
This might explain why tech support told you what they did.
I suppose that XP does not actually support SATA drives in the sense that they do include IDE controller drivers.
I found this statement at thispage
“Out of the box, no current Windows version, including Windows Server 2003, supports SATA drives. However, just as you can add a SCSI controller to Windows, you just need to add the correct SATA driver that ships with the motherboard or SATA host adapter. After you’ve installed the driver, Windows will be able to see the SATA controller and any attached devices. For more information about SATA, visit the SATA Working Group Web site at http://www.serialata.org.”
This might explain why tech support told you what they did.
In the Disk Management console you should see both drives in the lower pane. Right-click on the one without a drive letter and select “Change Drive Letter and Paths”. Click “Add”, select the drive letter you want, and click “OK”. That should fix you up.