load drivers from USB stick

[vinney22]

Hi, I want to reload windows but because I have SATA hard drives I need to install the driver at the F6 prompt. I normally do this via the floppy drive but it seems to be acting up and wont read discs. I'm not sure if there is a way to clean it or not, but my question is can I load the needed driver from a USB stick? Thanks.

Motherboard ASUS K8V SE Deluxe
Primary HD 80GB SATA
Secondary 250GB SATA
CPU AMD Athlon 64

[GX44]

Windows setup should load the drivers required for this... I have SATA HDD drives and didn't have to install any additional drivers in order to successfully install Windows.

[patio]

2 things you can try:
Radio Shack still sells a floppy head cleaner...you add a few drops of alcohol on a fabric type floppy and run it in the drive for 20 seconds.

Another option is to format a brand new floppy, copy the drivers to it and see if it works properly.
Head misalignment is the most common cause of this.

GX44 i have always had to have the drivers ready for a SATA drive with XP. It's never seemed to pick them up on it's own for me.

Vinney the only reason a USB stik might not work is that the XP setup process has not loaded USB drivers yet.

[GX44]

Thats strange, Patio. It was a year ago I did this, but I'm positive I didn't run into any problems with this issue.

Until now, I just assumed it wasn't an issue. I may be re-installing Windows soon (I want to try Ubuntu to see what it's like) but I will let you know if I run into this problem when/if I do.

vinney, go with patio's advice then... 

[patio]

All 3 major brands did the same thing...
Western Digital
Maxtor
Seagate

I found that if you simply continued with the installation XP would thrash around for a while and then say "no HDD found on system"

 

p.s. This happened with both newly formatted and brand new drives.

[Deerpark]

To my knowledge it isn't the actual SATA drive XP needs drivers for, but  the SATA controller. The ones I've needed drivers for have also been RAID controllers... don't know if it's just a coincidence though.

[patio]

To me it's just inexcusable that these were not included in XP's release...
Vista BTW isn't much better.

But they can include a library of over 150 video drivers though...

[Broni]

Vista BTW isn't much better.

I think, experiences differ.
I reinstalled Vista on SATA HD, and I also didn't have to install any extra drivers.
Or, maybe it happened because I used Compaq Recovery CDs, and those drivers were included?

[patio]

Yep.

GX44 Do me a favor when you do your XP re-install...
Check and see if at that point you can point the XP install to look for drivers on a USB stick and see if that option is available.
I can't recall if it is and this would be helpful knowledge for the Forum Users...

Thanx !

[Broni]

OK.