[Peter B]

I recentley aquired an AMD processor tower with no Sata connections and no hard drive. I had a 500gb Western Digital sata hard drive. I got a pci sata card and installed it, now I know I have to load the drivers for it but I boot from Windows XP and hit F6 to install the drivers and then all of a sudden it wants me to insert them from the floppy... the drivers are on a cd. Is there something in bios that I need to set to let the drivers load from a cd/dvd rom? I have 2 dvd roms installed in this tower. I just want to get this tower to work....
Thanks.

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Installing drivers via F6 is only available from floppy disk or an external USB floppy. There is no supported method of doing it any other way from any other drive.

The only alternative is a method called slipstreaming in which you can integrate drivers onto a new XP CD and hope it picks it up from there, so the driver you'd need would be on your CD. However this doesn't always work and you may have no option but to find a floppy disk and a floppy disk drive, copy the drivers from the CD to the floppy and use that to install onto your drive.

[Neil Jones]

Installing drivers via F6 is only available from floppy disk or an external USB floppy. There is no supported method of doing it any other way from any other drive.

The only alternative is a method called slipstreaming in which you can integrate drivers onto a new XP CD and hope it picks it up from there, so the driver you'd need would be on your CD. However this doesn't always work and you may have no option but to find a floppy disk and a floppy disk drive, copy the drivers from the CD to the floppy and use that to install onto your drive.

[cook777]

Installing drivers via F6 is only available from floppy disk or an external USB floppy. There is no supported method of doing it any other way from any other drive.

The only alternative is a method called slipstreaming in which you can integrate drivers onto a new XP CD and hope it picks it up from there, so the driver you'd need would be on your CD. However this doesn't always work and you may have no option but to find a floppy disk and a floppy disk drive, copy the drivers from the CD to the floppy and use that to install onto your drive.

If that is the case why would they sell it like that?

[Neil Jones]

Because nobody uses floppy disks any more, therefore F6 install under XP is technically obsolete and Vista setup does it a lot better anyway where you can feed it a driver from any location you care to mention.

Also in this day and age installing an operating system onto a drive connected to a PCI card is not all that common now on the basis boards have everything and then a little bit more as standard, rendering the idea of installing onto a separate card virtually unheard of and surplus to requirements.

[Gnomad1600]

If that is the case why would they sell it like that?

The reason they sell it like that is because Windows XP was released in 2001, whereas SATA was developed in 2003. When XP was released there were no SATA drives to include drivers for.