Q: I have a PC which used to run Windows XP Media Centre, unfortunately, it crashed a little while ago, the fault caused only a black screen and a cursor arrow to be displayed. The restore disks I’d created immediately following delivery, would not even attempt to restore it to a working condition, because the restore DVD said it couldn’t find the recovery.log file and then reported that the restoration had failed.
The puzzling thing is that a brand new Windows XP disk won’t install either.
Installation does not progress very far before a message pops up which says something to the effect that “Windows has detected a hardware problem,
installation has been halted to prevent damage to your P.C.”
After spending far too much time trying to resolve the problem I have eventually come to the conclusion, that the problem is Windows XP apparently doesn’t recognise SATA drives.
So the question is, how do you get Windows XP to install onto a PC with a SATA hard drive?
A: You’re right in that XP straight out of the box doesn’t recognise SATA hard drives, they weren’t in common use when the operating system was introduced. You need to have the SATA disk’s drivers on a floppy disk, then press F6 during the setup and you’ll be prompted to insert it. You’ll then be returned to the setup screen from where you can press S to load the drivers then proceed to install XP to the SATA drive.
Of course many modern systems don’t have a floppy drive which presents a bit of a problem. The manufacturers will have created the system disk using an image so they don’t have the same difficulty. Provided you have access to another PC you can get around this by creating a slipstream CD. You’ll need your original XP disc, a copy of the SATA drivers – download these from the disc manufacturer’s website if you don’t have them already – a new, blank CD and a program called Nlite. This allows you to create an install CD with the drivers, and any other additions such as service packs, built-in. Full detailed instructions on how to do this are here.
SATA hard drives weren’t widely available when XP launchedOriginally featured in PCU134
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