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How to boot XP from eSATA?

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3 replies

by mswirski0135

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XP does not have the drivers required for SATA until it is booted. Which is why generally people say you can't boot XP from eSATA. However, some posts on different sites seem to indicate it is possible if your motherboard has a native eSATA slot(mine does, ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe), and some suggest you can alter the boot order so that the SATA drivers get loaded before XP. And yet others suggest if you have a good BIOS it will work.

Can anyone offer some clarity to this issue?

3 replies

by thechas

You want to mix Windows and sanity!
What are you thinking?

Anyhow, yes, you can boot XP from an eSATA drive. Many notebooks only have eSATA drives. My desktop boots from an eSATA drive, and I did not need to do anything special to make that happen.

It all depends on what type of SATA controller you have and how the BIOS handles the SATA drives.

The general demarcation is if the SATA controller is part of the motherboard chip-set, or a separate controller.

If the SATA controller is part of the chip-set, you should have no problem installing XP to a boot drive connected to a SATA port. You do need to verify that the SATA controller is in the boot sequence, and that the correct drive is set as the boot drive. You may not even need to install drivers.

If the SATA controller is on a separate controller chip or card, then you do at a minimum need to install the driver. For some of the on-board SATA controller chips, you need to enter the controller BIOS (after the normal POST) and configure the drive as a RAID volume. Even for just a single drive.

I'm not sure what would happen if you installed XP from a SATA DVD drive.

Chas

by oh smeg

you can use one of these options to make a Slipstreamed Install Disc just keep in mind that the Articles where not specifically designed for this so they have different wording for adding SP2 to the Install Disc but the procedures are exactly the same

http://tinyurl.com/326fg3

http://tinyurl.com/2ehzk3

the second one may be the same but a Word & PDF file that you can download locally. Not sure it's been a long time since I've looked.

Or you can use a Software Application like nLite to achieve the same thing

http://tinyurl.com/e2mo4

Again I'm not sure what would happen if you try to Boot off a SATA Optical Drive.

Col

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