Finally was able to install Windows XP on a SATA HDD

XP Does indeed support SATA. Here is my HP DC7600 which had XP on it for 9 years before I upgraded to Windows 7 last year.



It has 2 SATA 3.5 inch drives. I didn't have to install any drivers, only used my XP Media Center Edition 2005 CD which has SP3 slipstreamed.

It seems more of a motherboard issue rather than an XP issue.

 

As noted, after I pulled the original IDE drive I put in one of the "new" 300GB SATA in as the 2nd SATA drive. Now the SATA drives were Disk 0 and Disk 1. I also wanted to replace the original 1st SATA drive with the 2nd SATA drive. Since this was a system disk all I wanted to do was clone it. The problem was AOMEI Backupper Free did not support it. I then tried EaseUS Todo Backup Free but it wouldn't do it either. I ended up installing EaseUS Todo Backup Trial which did successfully clone Disk 0.

I removed the original SATA drive Disk 0 and put Disk 1 in its place. I put one of the other "new" SATA drives in as the new Disk 1. When I booted the computer I was perplexed that Windows XP did not show is as D:. Disk Management showed why. It said it was initialized as GPT which Windows XP didn't support. I realize there is supposed to be workaround for this but I passed on that.

I then thought back on this. I don't remember making the disk GPT. I then realized what happened. When I got all three "new" Seagate 3.5" 300GB SATA drives they were not initialized or formatted. I did so with my Windows 11 laptop in order to check them with CrystalDiskInfo and CrystalDiskMark.

I put the "problem" drive into an external enclosure and connected it to my Windows 10 desktop. I then ran EaseUS Partition Master Pro. Even if I deleted all the partitions on the drive, it was still GPT. I then found I had to use a tool it had to convert this drive from GPT to MBR. I then repartitioned and formatted it again. It was now formatted NTFS and was MBR like I needed. I had to do the same thing with the 3rd Seagate 3.5" 300GB SATA drive. Note I probably did more steps than I had to but it’s done now.

When I put the Seagate 3.5" 300GB SATA drive back into the Windows XP computer as Disk 1 it worked OK this time. I haven't decided yet what I am going to do with Disk 1. I may use it as a backup for Disk 0 or install Windows 7 on this computer again. Note that I am not using the 3rd “new” Seagate 3.5" 300GB SATA drive right now. It will be my spare drive for the Windows XP computer.

 

You just don't understand. It's the controller that isn't supported not SATA. This was well known fact back in the early days.

Install Windows XP on a SATA hard disk

How to slipstream SATA drivers into Windows XP setup CD, on your dual boot PC with Windows 7 or Vista

I have a first generation computer with SATA. Since SATA was an afterthought it was an added as chip on the motherboard and was never supported in the BIOS. It was never a part of the motherboard chipset so the chipset driver did not support it. The SATA chip required a separate driver from its manufacturer.

I even tried a Windows XP Pro CD with SP3 integrated into it. Id didn't find my SATA controller either.

You said it was a "motherboard issue". You are right. However, I contend that all motherboards with SATA support that were released in these early days had the same problem. It wasn't until SATA was properly integrated into the motherboard chipset and supported in BIOS that SATA drives were recognized when Windows XP was installed. Your motherboard is one of these. Lucky you!

Note my motherboard has the Nvidia Nforce2 chipset. It never natively supported SATA.That is why the motherboard had the Silicon Image Si3112 SATA controller chip.

The ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (2002) and ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe (2003) motherboards supported SATA drives even before you could even buy them. They were also some of the first to support dual-channel RAM.

I challenge you to find any motherboard that came out in 2003 that supported SATA in its chipset and in the BIOS. Don't waste your time because there were none. Just like my motherboard Windows XP they didn't see SATA drives without the needed driver either.

BTW, back in 2002 & 2003 dual-channel RAM was so new that dual-channel RAM kits did not even exist. You had to buy individual sticks and hoped they worked in dual-channel mode. I paid $378 back in 2002 for 2 sticks of 512GB DDR RAM because I had read that someone had tested them successfully with my motherboard. In 2011 I bought a 2GB (2x1GB) dual-channel DDR RAM kit for $61.

 

Normally if the motherboard has the port the bios should see it if it is enabled. As for XP, it does support Sata but in IDE Mode. As I mentioned before my old motherboard, Asrock P4i65g had 2 ports. But since they only worked in IDE, XP detected them with no problems at all and no additional drivers required. When you checked device manager it was detected as IDE. Anything other than IDE Mode, You have to provide a driver. It can be preloaded with nlite or use a floppy and press f6 when setup is loading. I think your motherboard Sata chip might work as Raid and it has to load the raid "bios" for it to work. In that case I think that the computer bios might not see the drive but the raid bios should. I remember one time I had a PCI IDE card and if it loaded fine XP would see the drive. But I never installed XP directly to it and I don't have it anymore to test.

 

I was confused when I first started seeing these options 15 years ago. Depending upon the motherboard you might see either SATA or IDE modes. They were the same thing and just meant a SATA mode where there was some backwards compatibility with the old IDE mode. AHCI mode originally depended upon an AHCI driver to utilities its benefits. Later motherboards incorporated AHCI into the basic Windows drivers. This made SATA or IDE modes obsolete so they were eliminated in the BIOS. In the BIOS you then had to choose either AHCI or RAID.

SATA Modes
SATA or IDE = Basic SATA mode. Allows backwards compatibility with legacy IDE interface.
AHCI = Advanced SATA mode. New features added to increase performance of random workloads. Hot swapping support also added.
RAID = SATA drives used in RAID configuration

 

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* PART 2 *
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I want to start by admitting that I had made a big mistake that not only cost me time but maybe one of my drives. I was having a problem getting the Windows XP computers to accept the new SATA drives I was trying. I finally realized what the problem was.

Before I used them on my Windows XP computers I prepared and tested the drives on either Windows 10 desktop or Windows 11 laptop. What I didn't realize was it was initializing them as GPT. Once I realized that I had to use EaseUS Partition Master Pro on my Windows 10 desktop to convert them all to MBR. After that they all worked on my Windows XP computers. Note even the two 2.5" SATA HDDs that I had given up on now worked.

BTW, back in March I had tried a IDE to SATA adapter with Computer #2. When I used it with a Seagate 1TB HDD Windows XP wanted to format it. I let it. When it finished the drive no longer worked. I now suspect the drive was GPT. I wonder if that confused Windows XP and caused formatting to kill the drive?

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I wasn't going to use SATA HDDs with Computer #2 because it didn't support them. However, I finally found a card that I had lost that would do that. I was able to use the SATA/IDE controller card with Computer #2 to install Windows XP Pro on a SATA HDD.

I will compare what I did with Computer #1 and Computer #2. Note that with both computers I had to hit F6 in the Windows XP setup and load the SATA drivers from a floppy disk. Otherwise, the setup would never see any SATA drive to install on.

1. Summary of how SATA is implemented with Computer #1 and Computer #2



2. Computer #1 uses SATA chip on motherboard. Computer #2 uses SATA chip on PCI card


3. Computer #2 only shows IDE (PATA) drives in BIOS.



4. Since BIOS does not directly see SATA drives then boot drive is set to SCSI.



5. Computer #2 booting showing it only detects IDE CD and IDE hard drive.



6. However, the SATA controller BIOS does detect the SATA hard drives



7. During the Windows XP Setup the user is given an opportunity to load their own drivers by hitting the F6 key.



8. If F6 has been pressed and after the setup has loaded its own drivers the user is prompted to insert a floppy disk with the drivers they want to load.



9. A screenshot showing the files on the SATA driver floppies. Computer #1 (Silicon Image) and Computer #2 (VIA).
Note the file txtsetup.oem file contains the text with the options for the drivers. These options are displayed when Windows XP is setup.


10. The SATA driver options for Computer #1 are shown. The one for Windows XP is selected.



11. After the SATA driver is loaded the user is given the option of loading additional drivers from a floppy drive or continuing the setup.



12. Current setup for my Windows XP computers. Both now boot from SATA HDDs. All IDE hard drives have been removed or will be. Note the CD or DVD drives are still connected with IDE (PATA).
Computer #1 boots from SATA HDD1. Computer #2 boots from SATA HDD2.

 

Glad you finally solved it. I have a question. On that old motherboard I had that same Via card that you're using and I had the problem that when writing to a drive that was connected there the OS would feel jumpy. Like even the cursor wouldn't move right till the writing was finished. So how is the performance with that PCI Card vs the IDE drives you used before connected directly to the motherboard?

 

In the early days the non-RAID mode for SATA drives was either called SATA or IDE depending upon the motherboard. When SATA drives became more advanced they called the new mode AHCI. Eventually the old modes were dropped leaving only AHCI.

After switching both my Windows XP computers to use SATA drives I ran CrystalDiskMark on both the IDE and SATA drives. I was surprised that the SATA drives weren't much faster in the Sequential benchmark. However, the SATA drives were noticeably faster in the Random benchmark. I found the computers booted much faster with SATA drives compared to IDE ones probably because of their Random performance. That makes sense because of fragmentation of the drives most reading and writing is probably random anyways.

BTW, Most people seem to emphasize the Sequential instead of the Random results even for SSDs. I bet that is because that is what the manufactures want. People are buying the drives with the fastest sequential speeds not realizing these are meaningless.