Vista install on SATA

This isn't a question as much as it is an observation of MS's really, really odd way of doing things. Today I finally got around to rebuilding a crunching rig into my main rig, which included installing Vista Ultimate. For drive units I've got a 1 Tb HDD and an IDE DVD-RW. So, having heard Vista had built-in SATA drivers I popped the CD into the DVD player and started installation. When it got around to picking the HDD it just refused to install - apparently it had no SATA driver and even though it could see the drive it couldn't format it. After attempting to give it SATA drivers (that didn't work either - I couldn't find them) I did the next best thing. I pulled out the SATA DVD I have laying around for my crunching rigs and plugged it in. Sure enough, Vista now installed just fine, no extra drivers or anything else needed.

With it's lack of internal logic I sometimes have to wonder if Windows is written by women.

So, you had a SATA HDD and an IDE DVD drive and it wouldn't install but a SATA HDD and a SATA DVD drive and it worked (just making sure I understand this correctly)?

You have it correct! Welcome to the wonderful world of Microsoft!

Psykoikonov said:

So, you had a SATA HDD and an IDE DVD drive and it wouldn't install but a SATA HDD and a SATA DVD drive and it worked (just making sure I understand this correctly)?

Click to expand...

Looks like maybe a faulty HDD. Because I have a SATA HDD and a PATA optical drive and Windows Vista installs fine.

From my experience, you have a faulty HDD. (If the HDD appears, but you get an error after you select it.)
(This occurred with a bad Western Digital Caviar WD5000AAJS.)

Vista installed just fine on the "faulty" HDD has been running non-stop since yesterday. Faulty HDD now has over 100 Gb of data on it.

I also didn't expound on the other hardware involved (since it didn't seem pertinent) but there were two other HDDs in there as well (another 1 Tb and a 1.5 Tb) - neither of which could be formatted from the IDE DVD but both of which could be formatted from the SATA DVD.

No, this is definitely a case of an MS idiosyncrasy showing itself. Vista couldn't find it's SATA drivers until I forced it to use them by putting the OS DVD in a SATA drive. M$