When installing Windows XP, most of the time you'll
find that it has the basic drivers it needs to install itself. However,
sometimes you might need to intervene. This tends to be the case
if you have a special type of storage, such as Serial ATA or a RAID
device. In situations like this, you need to load the necessary
drivers from a floppy disk at the beginning of the setup process
so that Windows Setup can see the disks you want to install to.
Usually, when you get a card or motherboard that has storage controllers
which need special drivers, the necessary files will be provided
on a floppy disk. This isn't always case, however. That's not a
problem though, as all you have to do is locate the driver files
and put them onto a floppy. The first thing to do is look for an
installation CD. It may have a tool for creating a driver floppy.
If not, it might just have the driver on it, in which case you'll
have to create the floppy disk yourself. Otherwise, try the manufacturer's
website, where you will probably find a downloadable version of
the drivers.
Here we have a downloaded driver for a Serial ATA
RAID controller found on many motherboards. It's a zip file, so first
of all we'll have to extract the contents of it.
This is the contents of the downloaded file. In this
case, there's just one folder, but sometimes you'll find folders for
different versions of the Operating System, along with extra programs
such as utilities. If there's a makedisk program, you can probably
use that to create the driver floppy. If not, look for the file "txtsetup".
Windows Setup looks for this file on the floppy to tell it what drivers
are available for it to load. If you're in a folder with that file,
then you're probably looking in the right place.
Copy the files to a blank floppy. Don't put them
inside a folder, put them on the root of the floppy.
Now you're ready to put the floppy and Windows XP CD into the target
computer and start setup.
