Sunday SATA Install hell

I was expecting to have a nice relaxing Sunday, but after a friend dropped off his new super-duper-SATA machine for me to load XP onto for him, I was dropped into a spiral of despair.

The drivers for the SATA RAID controller on the motherboard needed to be installed from floppy disk during the XP installation, but the machine did not even have a floppy drive. XP was also being anal enough to insist that the drivers came from the A: Drive and did not allow me to obtain them from anywhere else!

I spent a little time trying to fool the BIOS into thinking that the A Drive was actually one of the memory card reader slots on the front panel - but this did not work at all.

In the end, I had to download the driver files to my PC and slipstream them into my installation of XP for the system to use them. At the same time, I made the installation totally "unattended" by entering the licence number, regional settings and options. I also slipstreamed in a copy of XP SP2 for good measure!

To do all of this I used an application called NLite which allows you to add all of the previously mentioned features plus extra patches, software and settings. It copies down your XP install disk, makes the changes you asked for and then burns direct back to a bootable CD!

Excellent!

Thanks NLite, you saved my sanity!