Installing a SATA drive onto a new system requires the installation of OEM drivers that may not be natively supported. What brought this to mind was an inquiry I had this weekend from a friend who had just purchased a new Maxtor SATA hard drive for his system. I did a Google and it appears that this continues to be a problem for some folks who may not be familiar with the procedure of having to install OEM drivers in order to get Windows XP to install properly.

Microsoft has a KB articles that describes the procedure here. The basics are as follows:

When you are installing Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 on a new computer or on a computer that has the latest SCSI or IDE controller technology, you may have to use an OEM device driver to support, for example, a new mass storage controller, to continue with the installation. The symptoms that you have to install an OEM device driver include the following:

•	The computer may keep restarting and never start the GUI installation after the text mode Setup is finished.
•	The Setup program may stop, and you may receive an error message if the Setup program does not correctly detect the controller.
•	If you are booting from the installation floppy disks or CD-ROM disc, you receive the following error message:  Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your system If you are upgrading by using the Winnt32.exe file, or if you are performing a new installation by using the Winnt.exe file, you receive the following Stop error: Stop 0x0000007B Inaccessible_boot_device

This behavior may also occur after you update the firmware or the BIOS of a supported SCSI controller if the update causes incompatibility with the SCSI driver that is included with Windows.

There is one key sentence in the instructions that I like Windows pauses briefly:

During the text-mode phase of the setup process, Windows pauses briefly and prompts you to press F6. This option is displayed in the status line and lets you use an OEM mass storage controller driver. The F6 option is provided strictly as a means to install OEM drivers for mass storage controllers only. This is required to let the installation of the operating system continue. Microsoft does not support using F6 to install any device driver other than mass storage controller drivers.

You have to be quick on the trigger to press F6 to install the drivers. The pause is in fact brief.

Hope this helps.

Comments welcome.

[tags]sata, hard disk, oem, drivers, installation, procedure, [/tags]