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octopusdataFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Need to change SATA controller driver for an existing XP installation

The nVidia nforce controller on my A8N32-SLi motherboard has given up and doesn't detect my SATA HDD in the BIOS. If I conect the same HDD to the Silicon Image Sil3132 controller (which was previously disabled in the BIOS) the HDD is detected in the BIOS and XP starts to load but hangs very quickly. I think this is probably caused by the lack of an XP driver for the Sil3132 controller as it was disabled.

What do I have to do to get access to my XP installation?

Any help HUGELY apreciatd :)
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jp10558

Well, your only hope is likely something like Acronis True Image Workstations' Universal restore add on. It's about $130 to purchase for the base program and the add on. This would allow you to image the partition to an external drive, NAS, or what have you, and then restore while injecting the proper Mass Storage Drivers.

Alternatively, you could try and do an upgrade in place (a soft reinstall), but I've had mixed success with Windows XP allowing you to do this on a non-bootable system. Sometimes it will let you, othertimes it will not. I haven't worked out why it does or does not work.
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willcomp
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I agree with willcomp - parhaps the only solution is to reinstall Windows and use the proper driver: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/FileList/NewTech/old_motherboard_newtech/tech_silicon_image_3132_e_001.pdf otherwise your RAID controller won't function.



As a separate note - absolutely irrelevant to your problem - just wonder why people keep suggesting Acronis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronis_True_Image) while Symantec Ghost is 3 times cheaper (http://www.symantec.com/business/products/purchasing.jsp?pcid=pcat_infrastruct_op&pvid=865_1) and is 100% reliable tool.
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ASKER

Thanks all for your comments. I was hoping a full repair wasn't necessary and there was some way to simply install only the Sil3132 driver, however this doesn't seem to be the case?

Willcomp - great link to XPrepairinstall - from there I found clear instructions on how to create a streamlined SP3 disc using my XP SP2 OEM disk, which was my main concern with a repair. This helped reduce the number of issues afterwards (there always seem to be issues after a repair!).
igor - 1965: OT: Acronis vs Symantec Ghost. Symantec hasn't been as reliable for me as Acronis and in versions I used either
a) required installation in Windows first to take an Image, making in useless in cases like this - 2003 version was the last I bothered with and was like this
b) harder to use - 8.x didn't support CDs, you had to build your own bootable CD + network support etc
c) harder to use - older versions (circa 2000) were very unclear which disk you were selecting, providing only numbered drives, and no size info, several times I accidentially overwrote the partition I was trying to image.
d) Acronis provides inexpensive support options ($12 a year or so) that actually help (have helped me several times). Symantec support has been harder to get, and not as helpful.

Perhaps the above has changed, but the versions I've used are well and truly surpassed by current versions of Acronis.