Apr 3, 2010

Install XP on SATA hard drive.

I had a notebook with Vista installed on it and my internal hard drive went broke on one fine day. Now, i bought a new SATA hard drive and tried installing XP instead. Did the simple steps of formatting the hard drive as primary, plugged in the hard drive into the notebook, put the xp install cd in the drive, change the boot order to CD first and ran xp setup.
The installer loaded all setup files and boom -- BSOD! Error message "....Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated...".

I made the following troubleshooting checklist:
1) Make sure hard drive is working fine
2) Make sure the hard drive drivers are present during xp install

Step1: I tested the hard drive using the diagnostic tools from the hard drive vendor. Simpler approach is, if you have a portable hard drive, just remove the casing, replace the hard drive in the casing with the new one to be tested. Plug into your pc and should be able to browse the contents. If it's not formatted, format it to primary partition.

Step2: Since XP is years old, the XP install setup may not include drivers for the latest SATA drives and also, XP doesn't very much support SATA. So, the solution is to update the XP installer CD. For this, you need the following
- SATA driver for XP. Download it here.
- Download nLite, to tool to update the XP installer setup. Download it here.
- Follow the instructions on this link to create the updated XP installation CD.
- Now, install the XP from the CD and you should be good to go!

Hope this helps!