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Need help with XP install

hunterjwizzard

hunterjwizzard

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Mar 20, 2020
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Been banging my head for 2 days on this one. Got a beautiful Pentium IV system here built on an Intel D850MV motherboard here. The plan is to boot from a SATA HDD using a Promise SATA300 TX2plus PCI card. The machine has a floppy drive and I am blessed with an abundance of working floppy disks.

So I went on Promise's website, grabbed the drivers, dropped them on a floppy. Put my XP disk in the drive, booted up, hit F6. Put the floppy in the floppy drive...

...and friggin windows can't find any drivers on the disk. Have tried multiple drivers, multiple disks, and even multiple cards(I also had a Fasttrack TX 4300 that exhibits the same behavior. No matter what I do it can't seem to find the drivers on the floppy disk.

I'm running out of ideas, here. Any suggestions?
 
If I were you I would had done a test install of XP on a regular IDE disk, to check that XP will accept the drivers when it's installed, and if it then can see the SATA disk.

Also, is there any "IDE emulation" in the SATA card? If so maybe try that? I think that that was mostly a feature when SATA was a part of the motherboard rather than an add-on card, but still.

Also, does the floppy work correctly? I.E. write for example a DOS6 or Win9x boot disk to a floppy and check that the computer boots correctly from that.
 
Floppy drive works fine. Also a boot off of Hiren's CD sees the SATA card and SATA drive AOK. I don't know about IDE emulation, the card in question happens to also have an IDE port on it. But emulation or not means nothing to whether or not the windows XP pre-installation environment is able to apply drivers from a floppy disk.

Test boot to an IDE disk might be in order.
 
With IDE emulation XP and any other OS should be able to use it's IDE/PATA drivers to access the SATA disk (with worse performance, but still). Thus you should be able to run the installation without using a specific driver disk.
But again I think this was generally only a thing when the SATA controller was part of the motherboard.

What files does the driver floppy seem to contain? I'm not sure what files a disk has to contain in order for the XP installer to load drivers from it, but that seems like a thing to look into. Maybe it's something super simple like the files are in a sub dir but needs to be in the root, or the files are in the root but needs to be in an i386 sub dir, and/or any combination of this or whatnot.
 
So the IDE test went interesting. I'm not sure if this is related to the previous problem. Setup completed without issue. Now the machine boots, goes "Starting Windows XP" and then the screen goes black. It acts like its running. Never seen that happen before.

MiaM said:
What files does the driver floppy seem to contain? I'm not sure what files a disk has to contain in order for the XP installer to load drivers from it, but that seems like a thing to look into. Maybe it's something super simple like the files are in a sub dir but needs to be in the root, or the files are in the root but needs to be in an i386 sub dir, and/or any combination of this or whatnot.
Click to expand...
I've tried 2 versions of the driver. One had all files in the root directory, that didn't work. The other had an i386 sub directory. I tired that one with the files in the directory and copied into the root. Neither method worked.
 
In order for a driver to be seen by the F6 additional drivers menu, you need a special "F6 Floppy" version of the driver. This had a special definition file that defined what files were needed to be copied for the driver to work. You cannot just dump a pile of driver files on a floppy and have it work.

The only thing those existing drivers will do for you is get the card working on an existing Windows install, not a new one.

I'm sure the F6 Floppy variant existed at some point in time, but the special F6 Floppy driver requirement seems to be a bit of info that's been lost to time. Maybe you can try using archive.org to look at an old version of Promise's website and see if they have it available.

I know on my older SATA150 TX2 controller, it came with the F6 Floppy drivers.
 
Maybe look at an "F6 driver" for another card, as a guide to what files are needed?
I would think that it's likely the same binary .sys files as the regular driver, but there would be some file, probably an .inf file, that tells Windows what to do while loading. Maybe, perhaps?
 
After thinking about it for awhile, I remembered the name of the file required, "txtsetup.oem". This file must be in the root of the floppy and the directory structure of the drivers must be as they are in the archive.

It looks like the file is included in the drivers on the Promise website, but here's another link to a slightly different driver version: https://www.helpdrivers.com/disks/Promise/Sata300_TX2Plus/
 
Gig is right about F6. Somewhere there is a XP driver for SATA card. During the XP boot procedure it will ask you to insert the SATA floppy containing the driver and press F6 to continue. Also, XP will ask for a blank floppy for the 'Repair Console' feature and you will want to make that floppy if you ever need to troubleshoot the system.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
After thinking about it for awhile, I remembered the name of the file required, "txtsetup.oem". This file must be in the root of the floppy and the directory structure of the drivers must be as they are in the archive.

It looks like the file is included in the drivers on the Promise website, but here's another link to a slightly different driver version: https://www.helpdrivers.com/disks/Promise/Sata300_TX2Plus/
Click to expand...
That is the exact driver I tried first. I also tried Promise's own.

Both had txtsetup.oem.
 
So its finally booting off of the IDE hard drive. The issue was Windows XP defaulted to the maximum resolution of the monitor which without drivers the graphics card could barely handle. I figured it out today. Maybe 1440p screen ISN'T the best bench monitor.

Anyway, I think I might have identified the problem: the floppy drive does not work.
 
so the bench work is complete, all drivers are installed and machine is ready in all respects. It has been moved to its permanent home on the rack...

...where it is not working.

The machine is attached to and 8 port HDMI KVM which is in turn connected to my presentation switcher. Other PCs attached to this setup all work fine. This machine(attached via a DVI-to-HDMI cable) spits out a garbled, flashing screen.

EDIT: and it can't be a driver issue, its doing this before windows even loads. This is so friggin weird I can't even.
 
Ok, so I plugged a different PC in to the exact same setup: it worked just fine. Ergo the problem is definitely with some weird combination of this specific PC in this setup.
 
Your KVM probably doesn't like whatever resolution/refresh rate the computer is running at. Or you have some sort of strange ground loop going on.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Your KVM probably doesn't like whatever resolution/refresh rate the computer is running at.
Click to expand...
That seems to be the most likely explanation. The same video switcher has VGA in where the screen is just black until windows loads. I have previously ran equipment through an HDMI capture box and then into the switcher and it fixes this. But I can't put that device in line here because I have 4k sources in line. I would love to find a solution but its not terribly important.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Been banging my head for 2 days on this one. Got a beautiful Pentium IV system here built on an Intel D850MV motherboard here. The plan is to boot from a SATA HDD using a Promise SATA300 TX2plus PCI card. The machine has a floppy drive and I am blessed with an abundance of working floppy disks.

So I went on Promise's website, grabbed the drivers, dropped them on a floppy. Put my XP disk in the drive, booted up, hit F6. Put the floppy in the floppy drive...

...and friggin windows can't find any drivers on the disk. Have tried multiple drivers, multiple disks, and even multiple cards(I also had a Fasttrack TX 4300 that exhibits the same behavior. No matter what I do it can't seem to find the drivers on the floppy disk.

I'm running out of ideas, here. Any suggestions?
Click to expand...
Might be a dummy thing but I thought that only the folders with the specific driver version needs to be on a floppy. Turns out that the entire thing you're downloading from Promise needs to go on it, so not just txtsetup.oem and WinXP but the rest of files and folders too.

Also, Promise has all of their legacy product drivers on their website. I would suggest to download from them: promise.com/support/downloadcenter
 
NeilKnows said:
This is why "slipstreaming" drivers with products like nlite was so popular...
Click to expand...
I found it infuriating. I went over 20 years trying to get answers why my slipstream attempts always made coasters and non-bootable CD's and couldn't get straight answers beyond "read the instructions", as if that would explain why my results when following the instructions were not working.
 
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