XP Brain Teasers

Righty, where to begin... Well my shuttle decided that the Windows XP system directory had gone for a walk this morning. As I'm using Serial ATA which isn't directly supported by the mainboard I have to load a device driver from a floppy in order for XP's install to correctly identify my Hard Disk.

This is becoming somewhat of a pain in the arse as I don't have a floppy drive in the machine at present & don't wish to once again disassemble the bastard.

So I'm hoping you lot can give me some helpful suggestions or help with the following questions:

1. Can the WinXP installer read floppy drives that are connected via USB (i.e. can I buy a USB floppy drive & just connect it as and when this scenario may occour in the future)?
2. Can the WinXP install CD-Rom be modified so that my Serial ATA driver is on there (i.e. can I copy my WinXP cd contents and driver onto one disk & boot from that)?
3. As my shuttle supports booting from a USB device, has anyone ever created a bootdisk for the XP install & say loaded it and run it from a USB pen drive successfully?
4. I've got Mandrake Linux on another partition, is there any way I can use it (or download an addition to use on it) to check (& maybe even repair) the NTFS file system on my XP partition?
5. Are there any other alternatives I've not considered?

Cheers Peeps
Regards
Rob / MYstIC G

I can't give definate answers, but I think these may be of some worth, so here goes:

Re: 2. You might try reading up on Unattended install CDs. MSFN have an excellent guide. They essentially allow you to modify everything that's on the install CD - you can set it to install 3rd party apps automatically, replace system files (hacked uxtheme.dll is popular) and therefore, it may give the ability to include a SATA driver automatically. I'm sorry I can't offer any more than "maybe" - I'm yet to try it myself.

Re: 4. There are ntfs kernal modules available. Basically, it's all rather experimental. Read Only ntfs support is fairly usable, but Read/Write is rather touch-and-go due to Microsoft not having publicised the ntfs specification. However, if you have nothing to lose on that partition anyway then you could give it a go and see where it takes you.
Try: http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/ and http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ for some Google sourced possibilities.

With regards to the other points: USB access etc. I have an incling that it /will/ but I don't know whether it is dependent on Windows SP version, motherboard version of whether it's just bollocks.

Hope that helps out though.

Ben

*hugs*

Thanks for all this Shovel, I'm now working on a full install CD with the info from that site which even gave me a link with how to do a CD with _exactly_ my SATA driver incorporated ( http://greenmachine.msfnhosting.com/READING/addraid.htm ).

*clicks to add reputation*



Thanks
Rob / MYstIC G

1. yes

2. yes, and this is your best option.

Which SATA do you have?

Xav

*humps Xav*

I've done 2 now & it's a Silicon Image 3112

Suffice to say now knowing how easy it is to build an install CD, I'll be doing one that goes for full drivers, etc sometime soon.

Aye, they're great aren't they