Curse the guy who invented SATA drives
SATA drives. Hate them? I do.
Adding a SATA drive nearly drove me nuts!
A few days ago, I discovered that I’m running out of space. Solution? Pop in a new drive.
I wanted to install a fresh set of Windows on the new disk. The current C drive is running super low on space and as all of you know, cleaning up your junk won’t solve the problem forever.
I checked my PC this morning to make sure I have everything needed for the new drive to work. Popped the lid open and discovered that I need an extra SATA cable and SATA power convertor. Hmm …. no floppy drive.
I remember the last time when I first assembled my PC that I had some problems installing Windows. My motherboard being the first few to support SATA needed extra drivers loaded in order for Windows to detect them. And Windows being a bitch will only allow you to use floppy disk drivers. And NO .. there is no option to point to another drive.
Went to the storeroom and spent a good 15 minutes going through my junk. Couldn’t find a floppy drive. Nevermind I’ll buy one. But seriously who the hell uses floppies still? I had to buy a new drive just for the sake of installing Windows. Fuck it!
Checked for my motherboard CD and found the drivers. Great! Next I need an empty floppy disk. I need 1. Where can I buy 1 floppy disk these days? Called up a friend and got him to loan me a floppy drive and also a floppy disk. Hey don’t forget the floppy drive cable.
Went to get a shiny new Western Digital SATA II 250Gig drive. Got home and started the process.
After installing the drive, my PC couldn’t start up. Found out that the fan for my graphics card was not spinning. One of my RAM modules not detected.
After 4 days of troubleshooting, everything finally worked. So much trouble just to add a new hard disk 
Tags : SATA, hard disk, Windows, RAM, memory, floppy drive, cables, troubleshoot
Not just Windows.. I had so much trouble getting SATA to work on different distros of Linux/BSD including Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Debian, CentOS and Gentoo for a file server.
In the end, I gave up and used Win2k. I guess pragmatism had to win over my desire-to-experiment this time.
Why Win2K?
My other box running Ubuntu works fine but of course I’m using an IDE drive. Have not tried SATA on Linux.
ive never had any such problems. I got a new SATA hard disk for christmas and just plugged it in and it all worked fine windows loaded fine and all I had to do was mount it which took 30 secconds to do.
Simon: I’m using one of the earliest motherboards which support SATA and requires a driver to install Windows.