Thursday, October 21, 2010

How to Install SATA Drivers for enabling SATA native mode in Windows XP

For enabling SATA Native Mode on your computer AFTER installing Windows XP follow the below mentioned steps

Enabling SATA native mode will give you a slight performance increase and slightly increased battery life.

1. Download the Intel Matrix Storage Manager software for your computer from the manufacturer’s web site

2. Run it, by default it will save some files to C:\ before it runs setup and tells you that the software is not supported

3. Accept the license agreement, it extracts some files. The files you’re interested in are now in a “Driver” subfolder of the original folder and include the following :iaahci.cat, iaahci.inf, iastor.cat, iastor.inf, iastor.sys, TXTSSETUP.OEM

4. Now go to Device Manager, under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers you should see something like : Intel 82801GBM (ICH7-M Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller

5. Right-Click on that and select Update Driver

6. Say no to connecting to Windows Update to search, hit Next

7. Select Install from a list or specific location (Advanced), hit Next

8. Select “Don’t search. I will choose the driver to install”, hit Next

9. Select Have Disk

10. Browse to the Driver folder and highlight the iastor.inf file, hit Open

11. Select OK

12. Now you should have a list of controllers. **WARNING** Selecting the wrong controller for your computer will prevent it to boot, causing BSOD. Make sure you select the right controller for your particular computer !

13. You’ll get warned that installing the device driver is not recommended, click Yes to continue installing

14. Click Finish

15. Click Yes to restart your computer

16. When your computer boots up, you need to to enter the BIOS. Change SATA Native Mode to Enabled, save changes and exit.

17. After you log into Windows, your computer will find the “new” hardware. Wait until you get the popup message to restart your computer, say Yes to restart one last time.


Credits: http://saysprasad.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/installing-sata-drivers-for-enabling-sata-native-mode-after-installing-windows-xp/

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