SATA under Windows XP on a Mac Pro
Be aware that at present there are some fairly serious issues with running Windows XP SP2 on a Mac Pro via Boot Camp.
Specifically one showstopper - the SATA controller's drivers are all screwed up from a default install.
There doesn't seem to be an easy way to properly update the Intel SATA controller drivers _after_ installing Windows XP, and the Mac Pro (lacking a floppy) makes it hard to add the drivers during the initial installation.
The easy way to tell if the problem is affecting a machine is to check out the speed of the hard disk.
Using a clean, default Windows XP SP2 installation, once Windows is up and running I was seeing a glorious 3.7MB/sec. Or less.
Slipstreaming the drivers into the Windows XP installation CD, so they are there during the initial installation resulted in speeds of over 60MB/sec. Up to 20 times faster.
In addition to adding the correct SATA drivers, we can also slipstream the other drivers from Boot Camp, such as the latest nVidia drivers and the Apple Keyboard drivers which will save a lot of time manually installing the necessary drivers after installing Windows.
I've successfully used nLite to build a slipstreamed Windows XP SP2 installation CD with the relevant drivers and can confirm it works and the disk performance is what you'd expect it to be.
If I'm are going to deploy more than one Mac Pro with Windows XP, I pretty much need to build myself an XP disk with at least the Intel Chipset and SATA drivers preinstalled, and if I'm going to do that, then it would save heaps of time later on to also slipstream any current Hotfixes from microsoft as well, this way I don't need to spend an hour or so going through Windows Update... What fun!
5 Comments:
I'm curious as to what errors/problems happen if you try to update the drivers after installation using the latest applicable from Intel's website
What happens? It doesn't work - the drivers update, but the disk still runs at 3700 kb/sec...
Maybe I was doing it wrong (updating the drivers) but the new drivers seemed to be loaded yet the disk was still using non-DMA disk access...
don't you have the option to enable DMA access in devicemanager? should be in the channel, (not controller) props page.
and does the driver details page show that it is really isntalled ok (check version of relavent files) ie. does it actually install/update, or does it just say it installed.
are you using the setup.exe from intel to install drivers, or are you extracting them and using the update driver option from device manager
LRS.
No, I don't think the option to enable DMA is there. The problem is that it installs a slightly wrong version of the driver and when it tries to speak DMA to the drive, it has errors. Windows then remembers these errors and degrades the port for good.
There were reports that you could tell Windows (by some registry editing) to put the port back to full speed once it stops erroring, but either I didn't do it properly, or it didn't work for me.
Once I'd slipstreamed the updated driver onto the install CD, it worked perfectly and I haven't had the chance to go back into the old system and see what it's done differently...
All solved by the recent Firmware update?
Some people have the impression that it still doesn't quite give the performance that this chipset and suitable drives should provide.
But as I understand it, the firmware update enables the use of DMA transfers and therefore it is more or less an all oor all off kinda affair.
How have you faired with the firmware update and does it give the same or lower transfer speeds?
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