Finally was able to install Windows XP on a SATA HDD

I have a computer with a ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard. The motherboard has a Silicon Image Sil3112A SATA controller chip on it. Since it came out in 2003 there were no SATA hard drives available at a reasonable cost at that time. Over the years I had continued to use IDE hard drives with it.

A year or two ago because I realized my supply of IDE hard drives was dwindling as the drives slowly failed. I tried to buy a new IDE hard drive online but got turned off because a supposedly unused IDE hard drive failed after about one hour.

I tried to use a 1TB SATA hard drive with this motherboard but couldn't get it to work.

I bought a SATA to IDE adapter. When I tried it on my other Windows XP computer the 1TB SATA hard drive failed after using it was used for a short time. Now I am not sure if the adapter was faulty or not. I haven't used it since.

Finally I decided to try to use a SATA hard drive with my ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard again. I did the following:

• I booted the computer to Windows XP Pro
• I copied the Silicon Image Sil3112A SATA driver to a floppy disk.
• I shut down the computer
• I set the jumper on the motherboard to enable the SATA controller
• I disconnected the existing 250GB IDE hard drive with Windows XP Pro on it.
• I mounted and connected the 300GB SATA hard drive.
• I booted the computer with the Windows XP Pro w/SP1 CD
• After Windows XP setup started I inserted the floppy with the SATA driver
• When prompted I held down the F6 key
• Eventually after more setup I was prompted for the location of the driver
• The setup loaded the SATA driver
• I continued with the setup of Windows XP on the SATA hard drive

One annoying thing about Windows XP is unlike current versions of Windows I found that I had to leave the CD in the drive until setup was fully finished.

When I removed the CD and tried to boot Windows XP the computer couldn't find a boot drive. I went into the BIOS but couldn't figure out what to set as the first boot device. I finally decided to set the first boot device to SCSI. That worked. The computer booted then.

With that working I shut down the computer and reconnected the original 250 GB IDE hard drive. Now I have two hard drives connected to the computer.

I rebooted the computer and installed the following drivers:

• NVIDIA nForce chipset drivers v2.64
• Marvell LAN driver v6.28
• Nvidia Geforce driver v175.19

When I rebooted the computer I was surprised to see that the video was messed up. The resolution was fixed at 800x600 with only 4-bit color.

I decided that maybe that could be fixed by installing Windows XP SP3. After SP3 was installed and the computer rebooted the display was finally normal with the resolution at the expected 1280x1024 with 32-bit color. I checked and found that SP3 had installed an even older Nvidia driver than I tried. It might have been v93.71 which came out a couple years before v175.19. I then tried the Nvidia Geforce driver v175.19 again. This time it worked.

I have so far installed some software. I will post later what software I installed. In the morning I will try to activate Windows XP again. I am sure like last time it will involve calling Microsoft support again. I hope they were as patient as last time.

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One last thing. The other time I had tried a SATA hard drive with this motherboard I couldn't get it to work. The hard drive was a 1TB SATA 3.0 6Gbps one. This time I used a 300GB SATA 2.0 3Gbps one which worked fine. Was that the difference?

The controller on the motherboard is SATA 1.0 1.5Gbps. Does anyone know if that controller would have a problem working with a SATA 3.0 6Gbps drive?

 

Sata is backwards compatible. You can use any current sata hdd for your board. All it does is work slower. For easier setup next time you can create a Windows XP installation with Nlite that includes your sata drivers. That way you can ditch the floppy.

 

I just took this computer out of storage 6 months ago. Since I have gotten it to work with a SATA drive now when I have time I will slipstream the SATA driver into the XP CD. There was no sense doing it before until I knew it was going to work. BTW, I have used nLite before. The original Windows XP media had SP1. I used to have a copy where I used nLite to update the CD to SP3.

 

Update...I pulled the Seagate 300GB SATA 2.0 drive and replaced it with a Seagate 1TB SATA 3.0 drive. When the computer booted the SATA controller displayed a message on the display. Normally it would hesitate for a few seconds and then continue. This time the computer froze and wouldn't continue. I pulled the SATA 3.0 drive and put the SATA 2.0 back in. The computer booted OK again.

BTW, the Seagate 1TB SATA 3.0 drive has a SATA 1.5Gbps jumper. It made no difference whether it was used or not.

When I use CrystalDiskInfo the Seagate 300GB drive shows caution because of "Reallocated Sectors Count" greater than 0. This shows the disk may be failing. Since this is my only SATA 2.0 drive I need to look online and find a least one replacement drive.

 

Check the sticker on the HDD. Does it have an AF (Advanced Format) on it? Most HDDs 320GB and below don't have the AF logo. 1TB drives and above will definitely have it. WinXP wasn't designed to support AF SATA only regular SATA!

BTW, if you need another 300GB drive consider getting the notebook sized 2.5 inch drives. They're plenty available on eBay and designed to be bumped and moved around while powered on unlike the larger 3.5 inch desktop version that needs to be completely stationary. Also, make sure you don't get one with the AF logo so it will play nice with XP...

 

Thanks. I'll check out some hard drives on eBay. They have a bunch of cheap Pre-Owned drives that are pretty cheap. Would you suggest I avoid those and look for something new?

Are you saying I should buy a 2.5-inch drive instead of a 3.5-inch drive? If I do I will have to also get 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch adapters.

Note the drive I am currently using is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (ST3300620AS) 3.5-inch 300GB (300 MBps). It is working fine.

BTW, I started with three Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (ST1000DM003) 3.5-inch 1TB (600 MBps) drives. I tried one of them with a Startech IDE to SATA Hard Drive or Optical Drive Adapter - 40-Pin PATA to 2.5" SATA HDD/SSD/ODD Converter. The drive failed within a couple days even though CrystalDiskInfo had shown it as good previously. I would like to know what caused that? I just checked and see that this drive has AF on it.

 

Not preowned drives. More like open box. I bought quite a few of them on eBay. 320gb at 7200rpm and NO AF is the sweet spot. The SATA and power connectors are the same on a 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch drive. The only adapter you may need is something to fix to the PC case. I think most PC cases can house 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives with no extra accessories needed!

 

You don't understand that this computer is 21 years old. Using 2.5-inch drives in desktop computers was not common back then.

A diagram showing the internal and external drive bays.



A photograph of the computer in 2004. It was two years old then. Note the original motherboard was an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. After it failed it was replaced by an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe.

 

I don't know what went wrong in your case MisterED, maybe the 1TB hard drive is bad. I used to have a working pc that had the motherboard Asrock P4i65g. It had Sata I connectors. I could plug newer sata drives on it. Didn't matter if it was a laptop or desktop hard drive. It would just work. Never tried SSD because they were not that mainstream at the time. And Advance Format hard drive has nothing to do with the detection of the hard drive either. If you don't want the speed loss from the format conversion all you have to do is partition the hard drive as NTFS on a Windows 7 Setup disk and then reboot without installing Windows 7 then run Windows XP setup and install XP without formatting then it should work perfectly fine. When you're looking for hard drives to look for Western Digital. They tend to last more than Seagate.

 

When these ASUS motherboards were developed they were some of the first to even support SATA. In fact at the time you couldn't even buy a SATA hard drive because they had not been released yet. People that first bought these motherboards used IDE drives with IDE to SATA adapters until they could buy real SATA drives.

I just ordered a couple SATA 2.0 (300MBps) 2.5-inch hard drives off eBay to try them out with this computer. Hopefully they will work better than the SATA 3.0 drives I have now.

The 1TB HDD is definitely bad because when I put it in an external enclosure and try and test it with Seagate Seatools, Seatools itself crashes. Windows itself gives an error if I try to partition and format it.

An identical 1TB HDD caused this computer to hang when I connected it. Currently I have this HDD in an external enclosure. I have it connected to this Windows XP computer for making backups with AOMEI Backupper. This program works pretty well with Windows XP.

BTW, I wouldn't even consider using a SATA SSD in this old computer. However, I did put a SATA SSD in a much newer computer I built in 2009. It supports SATA 2.0. It is strange to look at testing this SSD with CrystalDiskMark. Sequential test results aren't much faster than regular hard disk drives. Where it excels is random tests where it is much faster than than a hard disk drive. With the SATA SSD the boot time was reduced from about 6 minutes down to 1 minute.

 

The motherboard is very old then. I remember that there were hard drives that were bigger capacity but had a jumper to limit the capacity for compatibility with certain motherboards. In fact I had an old Hitachi hard drive that was 80GB but had a jumper to limit the capacity to 32GB. Maybe that is the issue. Maybe the board just doesn't support 1TB.

 

SATA drives normally auto negotiate the SATA speed. The 1TB drive has a jumper to limit the speed to 1.5Gbps. I tried the jumper but it didn't help.

The first HDD I bought for that computer was 80GB. I am not even sure a 1TB HDD was available back then. You are right that maybe the size of the drive is the problem. I know that a 300GB drive will work. That is why the drives I am buying are 250GB and 300GB.

 

I don't know if you have already good place to get the hard drives but in the past when I was fixing and assembling computers I used to get hard drives from an ebay store called Goharddrive. I only had a problem with them once and they quickly responded by sending a new one.
https://www.ebay.com/str/goharddrivewholesaleandretail

 

I rarely shop on eBay so I don't have any favorites. Thanks for the recommendation. I will consider them next time.

 

I don't have a problem with Seagate. Once upon a time I bought a 240GB 2.5 inch Seagate and it worked for over a decade no bad sectors encountered till I retired the laptop computer. It's still inside that computer and should be working the next time I power it on.

That Seagate drive was Made in China, not Thailand, not Malaysia, not Indonesia, not Philippines. From that point on I adored all 240-320GB Seagate drives manufactured in mainland China.

The next drive I was impressed with is the 2.5 inch 500GB Toshiba made in the Philippines. I bought four of them new in retail packaging from local computer store. I used them for DATA backup and never had one fail so far.

The computer I'm typing this on runs off a 2.5 inch 320GB Western Digital drive. It's been working for 5 years so far no problems.

In short I don't think the brand of the HDD matters so long as it's WD, Seagate, or Toshiba! The only HDD I ever had fail on me was a Western Digital. That's 1 out of 20-25 drives (any brand) I've owned so far... So while you often read about horror stories of HDDs failing in data centers, in real life/consumer setting, they're pretty rare!

 

I have owned a home computer for 44 years now. I have had a computer with a hard drive since about 1992. I have had a lot of hard drives fail over the years. How many for sure I don't know because I only started keeping records about 20 years ago. According to my records I have had 15 internal hard drive fail. I have 6 other drives with a Caution status. These drives still work but have a potential to fail at some point. This breaks down as follows:
Internal HDD (Fail):
Maxtor: 4 PATA
Seagate: 4 SATA
Western Digital: 6 PATA + 1 SATA

Internal HDD (Caution):
Maxtor: 4 PATA
Seagate: 1 SATA
Western Digital: 0

External HDD (Caution):
Western Digital: 1 SATA

Note these failed drives are all 3.5" drives. I have only had 2 2.5" drives neither which has failed. I have ordered 2 additional 2.5" drives. Hopefully these will work for at least a few years.

CrystalDiskInfo Status:
Good: drive has no problems
Caution: Reallocated or Uncorrectable Sector Count > 0
Fail: drive not usable

 

I received the following SATA HDDs from eBay:
TOSHIBA MK2561GSYN 2.5" 250 GB SATA 2 (3Gbps)
TOSHIBA MK3261GSYFN 2.5" 320 GB SATA 2 (3Gbps)

It was a bust with my Windows XP computer. It could see the drives fine but I can't do anything with them. If I try to write to a drive already formatted it may try but eventually locks up the computer. If I try to reformat the drive it also locks up the computer.

I put the old drives back in as indicated in Computer #1 in my sig.

Note the drives work fine in an external enclosure with Windows 10 & 11.

I haven't decided whether I will return these drives. I can do so for free.

I may try some other 3.5" SATA HDDs in the computer. Maybe I'll have better luck with them.

 

I have a question. You said the motherboard is really old. How does Sata work there ? Is it Raid, Achi or IDE mode ?

 

Those are modes that are seen when SATA became mainstream and part of the chipset. In the early days SATA was implemented on a separate chip. As an addon it was not supported in the BIOS at all. The SATA chip on the motherboard had its own BIOS which is displayed on startup. The problem is the computer has no way to communicate with this SATA chip until a driver was loaded.

Windows XP never had drivers for the SATA controller on my motherboard. Not even SP3. There are two ways to load the SATA driver at setup:
1. Hit F6 at the startup and load the driver from a floppy
2. Use nLite to slipstream the drivers into the setup CD

Back in the 1990's and early 2000's some enthusiasts were using SCSI hard drives. They must have been faster than IDE drives. It wasn't uncommon for them to use them configured in RAID for even more performance. If you watch Windows XP during setup you will note that a number of SCSI drivers are loaded automatically. Note in 2001 when Windows XP was released there were only IDE and SCSI hard drives. SATA hard drives didn't come out until 2003. Even then SATA drives weren't very common until their prices came down a few years later.

What threw me at first is the only SATA driver I had was called RAID. I think the people would use these SATA drives in RAID just like they did with SCSI drives. I found out that this RAID driver could also be used without RAID. That is how I am using it.

I just bought three "new" (vender refurbished) 3.5" Seagate 300GB SATA hard drives just like the one in the computer right now. Last night I tried one of them in the computer. It showed up OK. I cloned the original Seagate hard drive to it. The new drive booted OK.

After I get done with testing I plan to pull the original Seagate SATA drive because it is showing Caution with CrystalDiskInfo. I will replace it with one of my other "new" Seagate SATA drives.

The computer also has an 3.5" 250GB IDE drive. I plan to pull it and save it for my other Windows XP computer which doesn't support SATA.

The only thing that worries me about the new" (vender refurbished) drives is how long they will last. CrystalDiskInfo showed that they all displayed information just like a new drive. For example, they showed 3 power ups and 0 hours of use. However, they are obviously not new since they probably haven't made these drives in over ten years. I checked the date codes and found: 2006, 2007, and 2009.

I am determined to get SATA hard drives working with this computer. My supply of IDE hard drives is dwindling as they slowly fail. Last September I bought a supposedly unused Western Digital 250GB 3.5" IDE hard drive. CrystalDiskInfo even showed it had never been used. Unfortunately, it failed only a few hours after being powered up. I think the date showed it was made in 2004 or 2006. I suspect it may have set unused on a shelf all these years. The drive was probably good when new but deteriorated over the years.

BTW, I had four other Western Digital 80GB 3.5" IDE hard drive on backorder. I canceled that order.

 

I think before Sata format was decided it changed. I had an old motherboard Asrock p4i65g that had 2 Sata ports. They were only IDE Mode. However I remember seeing other boards that the Sata ports were Raid and IDE mode. And then it finally settle to ACHI only. Now I don't think motherboards allow to switch to IDE mode anymore to force Windows 10 or newer OS.