Dear All, I am trying to clean install Vista Ultimate on a NEC VERSA S3200 laptop. During installation, the part where the harddrives need to be choosen, I find that Vista asks for device drivers and I cant see any of the 3 partitions on my HDD ... not at all... the screen is blank. But the damn CD which came along with NEC does not have any SATA or RAID drivers, so I am practically stuck. The options are that I need to find out what is the make of the harddrive and then try to download the SATA drivers for that particular make of HDD and feed it to Vista during installation - Is that the right thing to do? Alternatively I am also planning to create a Win 98 Boot Disk on a CD, boot the laptop on the CD, format/s C: ( dunno If it will format it as NTFS or FAT ) then access the D: drive and fire up the Vista installation from there .. a dump of the Vista resides in D: you see. Will it still ask me for the drivers? and will it reformat C: to NTFS during installation? Am i totally wrong in assuming that the drivers being asked by Vista is SATA drivers.....where will I get these drivers and where in BIOS can i find out the motherboard details ... If any of you can shed some light, I would be grateful.
Early on in the Vista install process, non-GUI part, you should see at the bottom of the screen the following message " F6 if you need a third party SCSI or RAID driver ", this is when you need to install your driver ( note: I've no experience with Vista, this is based on previous WIn OSs). Your HDD is SATA and you may be able to find the necessary drivers here, if not, at least you have some specs to search by.
thanks for the reply! Sadly, no during the vista install i do not see an option to load the sata / raid drivers .. the problem is i dont have any drivers to load. I will try to find out more about the harddisk from the Bios today. The NEC site does not have any drivers for the motherboard or IDE or SATA or RAID. When i called the NEC helpline they said they do not have any drivers and wanted me to bring in the laptop to their service center. cheers.
SATA is another form of the ATA/IDE standard, and in and of itself does not require drivers. However, many SATA controllers function as a RAID controllers and usually can be switched between standalone SATA mode and RAID mode in BIOS. If you know what chipset the laptop uses, you should be able to track down a SATA RAID driver from that company.
The only time i've ever seen Vista need SATA drivers is on hardware that was made well before Vista came out. Like years before. If NEC has a customized Vista install CD (some companies do) you might not see the prompt to hit F6 and you might not be able to load the drivers that way. Again though I don't think you would need drivers. Check the BIOS and see how the SATA is setup. Usualy there are options such as"Run SATA as RAID, AHCI, or IDE. For Vista you can use AHCI or IDE, older windows OS's usualy require that you use IDE.
