You never know when you'll need the old 3.5 floppy drive..

[Shinobi]

I was trying to install Windows XP on my computer after the hard drive crashed... this is a 1.7Ghz Athlon (socket A). I use this computer to record my music on... my programs that I have will not work in Windows 7.

So I had two 160 GB SATA drives and I hooked them up to a PCI sata controller card, but what I forgot... is that I need a floppy disk to install the Sata raid card drivers, during the Windows XP install. Luckly, I had a floppy drive in this computer, plus one in my Windows 7 computer.. I'm glad that I did not throw them out! LOL..

I got everything up and running again..

[YeOldeStonecat]

We have a USB one that we've used once in a while for this (although TBO it's been at least 3 or 4 years since I've used it).

What I do is, set the SATA controller to legacy mode....install the OS, install the mobo drivers and the SATA controller drivers.....go into the registry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\pciide
The "Start" DWORD..set value to zero.

...or can be done via Device Mangler
http://www.bootbeta.com/blog/guide-e...tallation.html

Make those changes...reboot, go into BIOS, set to SATA AHCI mode....continue to boot into Windows.