SATA HDD and WinXP

[Edame]

I just put together a shuttle mini-system with a serial-ATA hard drive, only problem is that WinXP won't recognise the drive. The even bigger problem is that the system doesn't have a floppy drive, so I can't even use a driver disk and the XP install will only take floppies.

I was made aware of this before I put it together, so I bought a USB floppy drive and I've connected it to the MOBO. XP still can't find an A drive and I'm starting to tear my hair out.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to progress? I do have another PC, but it doesn't support SATA so I can't hook it up just for an install.
The USB floppy does power up with the PC, but I'm wondering if I need to change anything in the BIOS settings so that XP can detect it? There is an option for an A drive in the BIOS, so I chose to designate a floppy to it. XP then started asking for a disk in drive A, but it still isn't actually talking to the drive.

I don't have a clue what to do next.

[Ginger Tosser]

The USB drive wont be detected until an OS is installed. Do you have a FDD connector on the M/B you can hook up the FDD from your other PC to ?

<edit - Just looked at the website and it looks like it does indeed have a FDD connector on board, so you may be in luck>

[Edame]

I think I just found it, a real bitch to get to but it looks like my only shot.
here goes

[Edame]

I found that the USB FDD had standard connectors too, so I only needed the floppy cable in the end. All sorted now, thanks for the tip.

[NeilMcRae]

Edame,
One other thing to note. On my shuttle I had to set the DVDR drive to cable select to get the BIOS to assign all the right things so that I could use SATA and RAID otherwise it wouldn't boot.

Neil.

[Kirby]

Why dont you just boot off the XP CD then use the installer to format/partition the drive and install XP? Doesn't XP even see the SATA controllers on your board without 3rd party drivers?

[NeilMcRae]

You can boot off the XP CD no problem. But then you need a floppy drive to load the drivers as XP won't let you do it via CD. Its major lame,

Regards,
Neil.

[Edame]

Agreed, it really is lame. You'd think that they'd at least let you choose other drives. I'll take a look at the BIOS settings later, I've heard that this mobo does need a few settings changed.