I’ve been working on a computer for a co-worker for a while now, it’s taken a little longer due to the holidays. Today I came to the decision that it would just be best for the computer and myself to reinstall Windows. This computer had spyware and viruses that I had never even heard of. So to start off the day I inserted the wonderful Windows CD to start the install process. After the CD had finished loading its wonderful self, I discovered that it was missing the drivers for the SATA controller. I know this wasn’t uncommon for a while when SATA came out, and still now with newer chips and all. But this SATA card is about 3 to 4 years old, and plus the Windows CD had service pack 2 slipstreamed into it, so its not like I was I using a first gen CD.
After finding out the wonderful fact that the CD didn’t have the needed drivers, I did what anyone would do. I headed over to the manufactures website to get a copy of the driver to place on a floppy so that I could load the driver during the install. But after making the floppy, I made the wonderful discover that the computer didn’t have a floppy drive. So after this I decided to make a new XP disk with service pack 3 slipstreamed into it. After making that wonderful CD and booting it up, I discover that service pack 3 did not contain the proper driver either. It was time for round three, I redid the CD but this time I added the driver to the disc rather than hopping that a service pack would have it. I know that service packs do not always carry drivers, but I based the decision on the fact that after service pack 1 all my XP discs carried the proper drivers and most of my computers have the same SATA controller.
After I made the third disk and completed the install out got to the desktop of good old windows, at this point the wonderful activation window met me. At this point I had to find the licenses sticker that the manufacture had placed in the oddest place. After fighting with the computer to get read the sticker, I entered it to only find out that the license key was not for this version of XP. This brings me to the question how many versions of XP are there, and I don’t mean Home and Pro. Vista only has one all keys will work with all disks, this is not true with XP. I truly hate XP more than I ever had now.
#1 by Lloyd on April 26th, 2009 - 6:27 PM
Hehe, I actually had one of these a few weeks ago. Slipstreamed it and then Service pack three didn’t even have the right SATA drivers. Had to find it myself, do another slipstream and voila! Bad luck with that license key though!