Member Avatar for Gallienus

I have custom built cpu w/ a Sata boot Hard drive. Maxtor 320GB. I have a slave old IDE drive. The compture currently runs Linux booting from the SATA. I wish to also install Windows XP 64bit on a 141 GB FAT32 partition on this Hard drive.

Maxtor only provides a disk based MAXBLAST program which does nothing to aid installation. They provide no drivers.

When I insert the Windows XP boot CD it can only find the IDE drive, it absolutely does not see the SATA drive. There is an option during installation to load additional drivers from a 1952-era floppy drive. Ain't MicroSoft great? However I can never find a driver to load during this process: only an endless supply of expensive utility programs. Does anyone know where I can find a driver for the Maxtor "DiamondMax21" SATA harddrive?

No I don't want to erase Linux, format NTFS, nor install to the IDE.

Thanks for any help.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by jbennet
Member Avatar for Talonis

Did you try making a free partition on your SATA drive? Windows needs it's own partition.

Member Avatar for jbennet

Thats normal. Versions of Windows NT prior to Vista dont support the vast majority of SCSI or SATA controllers natively. Its not the HDD that needs a driver, its the controller (unless you are using a SATA RAID PCI Card or something, this will be built into the motherboard).

You need to go into the BIOS and set the SATA controller to IDE Emulation mode, then it will work.

A better way is integrate your motherboards chipset drivers into your XP CD using nlite. Then it can see the SATA drive. Beacuse its XP 64 bit (Server 2003 based) these drivers must be signed.

Member Avatar for Gallienus

Decided to just let Linux have that Sata drive since it sees everything. BTW the Sata had 2 Linux partitions + 1 FAT32 partition.

Installed Windows XP 64bit, SP2 on IDE slave drive. Even after all that it still can't see Sata drive.

If mount Sata other than ACHI the get kernel panic & Linux won't boot.

Member Avatar for jbennet

just install the chipset drivers on windows, then it should be able to see it.

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