Solved: Installing from original XP Pro CD onto a SATA drive

[PCBuilder]

I am in the process of moving my Win ZP from my 5-year old system to a new system which has a 500GB SATA drive. I am using the original 5+ year old Win XP Pro CD (pre-SP2).
I tried to install Win XP from this original CD. Part-way through the installation, it gave the size of Disk 0 @ ID 0 on Bus 0 on atapi [MBR] as 131,069MB which looks to me to be about 130GB, not 500! I did a quick format and preceded with the install. Later, I got a Windows Install error (blue screen) saying that "A problem has been detected & windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer." etc, etc.

Could this problem be the fact that the original Win XP Pro doesn't recognize a SATA hard drive?

Could anyone advise me how I could get an installation CD which has the updates such that a SATA drive will be recognized? I was hoping not to have to go out and buy a second copy of Win XP since I will be decommisioning my current system.

Thanks for any help you can give.

 

[Couriant]

i would assume the BIOS needs updating. Windows XP should not have any problems with SATA drives, or drives that are 500GB.

 

[metweek]

If you can't get the bios update to work I would suggest you just install Windows on a 130GB partition then make another partition on the remainder of the disk using Disk Management.

 

[PCBuilder]

Thanks for your responses guys - I'm often amazed how many great people try to help out other's of us that are not quite so up to speed. After I posted my message, I looked on another site to see if there was any help there - the site is www.buildyourown.org.uk. I found a guide to installing Win XP onto a SATA drive. I suspected the problem was that SATA drives were not available when I bought Win XP about 5 years ago and it did not know anything about the drive. On the buildyourown site, there is a link to what I believe is a fix. Go to http://www.buildyourown.org.uk/pc-installing/windows-xp/ The writer suggests that a driver for the SATA drive may well be available with the mobo. Voila - it was there on a CD. The writer's instructions for using it seem fairly clear and I will give it a try later in the week.

So, this is a fix for anyone else who is having the same problem.

TTFN!