floppy drive blues

DamoKen

Ok, old problem revisited again. That is the whole farce of WinXp not recognising the sata drives forcing you to load them from a floppy during setup. I know this from the last time I built my own machine so included a new floppy drive just for this reason.
However I just keep getting floppy error 40 on the new floppy drive. I've looked up reasons for this and it's either connection, cable or drive is bad. I know it's not the connection, I'll try changing cables tonight after which last resort will be to try a different floppy drive out of my old machine which I wanted to avoid doing.

I do have a usb key though so is it possible to use this instead of a floppy drive? Only thought of it today, differing opinions when I googled it and no straight answer.

One more thing, previously when I built a new machine there was a makedisk utility on the Asus mobo disk. I'm building this time using the BFG nforce 680i sli board and there doesn't seem to be anything like this on the disk. Best I could find was under E:\WinXP32\IDE\WinXP\sataraid a group of files including a txtsetup.oem & nvraid.sys .

Would it be sufficient to just copy these files onto whatever medium I manage to load them off?

cheers

Kimbot

Did you load them onto a CD??

DamoKen

jonny24ie wrote:

Did you load them onto a CD??

you mean slipstreaming using nlite or something? No though considered it. Unfortunately my old machine is acting the boll*x and dying all the time prompting reinstalls of WinXp on it making it hard to do anything lengthy such as create a slipstream disk.

Also why I don't really want to take the floppy drive out of it as I have to reinstall practically everyday, hence the new machine

8T8

I hated when that sort of thing happened to me too the drive would just not work properly after plugging the cable every which way round.

Easy solution;
1) Windows XP does not need SATA drivers, modern motherboards SATA controllers emulate PATA IDE controllers and so Windows will install without a driver. The bios should be set to this by default.

2) If building a RAID array then you must use drivers, the make disk utility is for that purpose on NVIDIA RAID arrays.

3) The USB drive will be detected as a removable drive in the bios or it should be at least so if you need to put drivers on it try that.

4) If you need a bootable USB drive don't bother with the floppy drive use this utility to format and make with these DOS files any USB drives bootable.

DamoKen

Hi 8T8, that might explain why the sataraid folder on the cd has a txtsetup.oem and the sata_ide doesn't. So you're saying if I went back into the bios and just disabled the raid which I enabled on the drives it should be able to get past this?

I'll check if this works. I don't want to use this approach though as I'd rather setup a raid array. There isn't any makedisk utility on the disk, I did try just copying the contents of the sataraid folder onto a formatted floppy last night and hit F6 on my other machine with the windows CD in the cd drive just to see if it might see the drives like that. I got the following :

RAIDCLASS = "NVIDIA RAID CLASS DRIVER (required)"
BUSDRV = "NVIDIA nForce Storage Controller (required)"

after it read the floppy. Didn't try to load them but think that might do the trick. These are the files I was considering putting onto the usb key.

So brings me to the last part of your post, not sure what to do here. I unpacked the dos rar and installed the usb tool. I could format it ok, but when I try to create a Dos startup disk it tells me there are no valid dos files at the specified location?

If I do manage to create a bootable usb key, can I then load the drivers off? it? Sorry, not sure what you mean here.

cheers

DamoKen

hey went home for lunch and checked out setting up without raid enabled and bingo! no problem seeing the 2 drives. Changed a bit since I last built 3/4 years back .

Also had a look at the floppy setup with fresh eyes and noticed I had somehow managed to pull the connector further down the chain from any connected to the psu when I was swapping the floppy cable around late last night. It was still connected alright, to the water pump which was now also disconnected. Only the machine turning off almost straight away at lunch made me look at the pump (which is fairly quiet) and then led me to follow the connections, no idea how I managed that but the brain starts doing funny things after building with no break for about 10 hours straight

Didn't know the activity light would come on the floppy when there's no power source connected though.

I'll try and re-enable raid tonight and see if I can load those drivers from the disk I copied them onto. Still unsure why there's no instructions that I can find as to how you load raid drivers if you're setting up in Raid

I'll give it a go anyway and see how it goes, at least I can build in normal mode anyway if that doesn't work.

cheers 8T8