Done_Fishin

Need to Upgrade your BIOS & no floppy available

If you can afford to spend some cash on a USB FLOPPY drive then you'll probably find a way around your problem. Just set the BIOS to check boot from floppy first (if required) and have a floppy diskette ready with the BIOS upgrade (follow the board manufacturers instructions from their site).
You may also have to enable "legacy support" for USB devices in BIOS. Check your Motherboard, laptop or PC User Manual.

Have you got a laptop or a modern desktop where no floppy drive is available or has not been installed and you're having problems loading your SATA drivers .. Your Install or Repair Install just won't proceed because of this ???


SATA - No Floppy Drive - F6 + USB Floppy "FIX"

If you require to do a Windows Install or Repair you can use a USB Floppy to supply the driver details of any SATA devices that might be required and aren't supported by XP SP1 or SP2.

There is a possibility that after starting to go through the install/repair routine that your floppy might suddenly disappear because "Windows Install" only recognises a few USB Floppy Drives. Initial use of the Floppy drive will be allowed due to it's being recognised via BIOS but this is later replaced by windows drivers as windows prepares to "take over" the installation process, so contact with the Floppy drive is lost.

If this happens you will have to "modify" the TXTSETUP.OEM file on the floppy diskette to add a few more codes so that the floppy remains recognised after the initial loading of files is done ..

I have found that, after hitting F6 initially when asked, the SATA drivers have been recognised on the floppy diskette and I have passed the first interrogation screens including the "Hit F8" to accept license agreement screen, then just after pointing to the disk or partition where XP should be installed, I get prompted for the Floppy drive again. However the floppy drive light doesn't light up or appear to be being accessed.
(If you haven't given a driver at this point you might get a BSOD with a STOP ERROR 0x000.... with some strange number or sometimes farther on the Install will halt, after restarting, at the screen with "39 Minutes left" for installation..

To make your SATA Floppy disk .. check your Motherboard CD, Use Everest or similar to find out what Hardware you have installed, Search the internet for your laptop make model & type then look up the hardware characteristics paying attention to what SATA devices are built in. When you are confident that you have the correctly recognised the SATA Interface .. look for drivers, once again using Google, Yahooor other search engine(s) of your choice.

If the file you find or download is in a compressed archive ( zip or rar) you should extract it to a convenient location on your hard drive.
The contents of the folder where you will have extracted the drivers will hold files pertaining to the installation and recognition of the SATA interface.
Usually it will contain a file with the name of the driver being installed.
It will also have a file called TXTSETUP.OEM which Windows will look at to ascertain what it needs to do to correctly recognise the device being installed.

Looking through an ASUS driver download for a RAID driver, it can be seen that there are two folders called Floppy 32 & Floppy 64 which hold the respective drivers for 32 or 64 bit OS's.
Drag the contents of the required folder to a floppy so it is in the root directory. The ROOT directory means that when you click on the A: drive to see the contents you will see the contents as is above in the contents side .. ignore the tree on the other side in the picture it would normally highlight the A: drive .. (or any other drive for that matter where you are sitting at the baseof the drive and have opened no drives)




this is one of the TxtSetup.OEM files ..

if you have a USB floppy that stops working as you start to install XP .. or you want to ensure that it continues working whilst installing from a USB Floppy .. then open the appropriate .oem file with Notepad
and add these lines under the appropriate OS that the driver requires to be used for

"or
[HardwareIds.scsi.JMicron_RAID_36x]

[HardwareIds.scsi.JMicron_AHCI_36x]

change x to the required value from 1-6

or

add all the lines under each
[HardwareIds.scsi.JMicron_RAID_36x]

[HardwareIds.scsi.JMicron_AHCI_36x]
heading .. for a general purpose driver

to give an idea of what I mean

all those entries are at the bottom of the the .oem file ..

Should anyone have problems understanding this procedure they are welcome to PM me for advice or clarification

linderman

If you need to add SATA or RAID controller drivers during the F6 prompt during windows install and dont have a floppy disk or USB floppy disk you can do this.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Insta...F6-47807.shtml