Installing SATA drivers into IDE drive

My mate wants to buy a SATA drive to replace his too small IDE drive. He wants to clone his IDE drive to the SATA drive without doing an XP repair. As here:

http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/company/inpress/2005/02-28-en-smallbizpipeline-trueimage.html

"Because Windows XP does not natively include SATA drivers, when you attempt to boot from the new, cloned SATA hard drive, you'll discover that Windows XP will not load. To prevent this, be sure to enable the SATA controller in the BIOS and load the drivers into Windows before cloning. Should you forget to do this, a repair installation of Windows will be required to make the machine bootable again without losing your data."

Problem is we cannot find a way of installing the SATA drivers! The CD does not offer the option on AutoRun but when the CD is searched it is there. When SetUp is run from there it fails with "Device not found". The floppy disk has a file called Si3112r System information, which when right clicked offers "Install", but selecting that does nothing except flash the screen.
So exactly how do you follow the above advice to "load the drivers into Windows before cloning" !??
Any help MOST welcome.

 

Simply turn on the SATA controller in BIOS with the drive attached, then boot to Windows on the IDE. Windows will ask for the driver, if one is needed. Not all SATA controllers require a driver.

 

Thank you for your quick reply.
We have not purchased the SATA drive yet as we wanted to be sure that cloning to SATA would be simple and not require Windows repair and subsequent Windows updates. (In which case he would just buy a bigger IDE drive)
We could probably borrow a SATA drive but it would have an OS etc. already installed on it. Would this work, i.e.would the IDE Windows still ask for a driver?

 

You may not need a drive attached for the controller to install, just try it.
In any case, just wait to do the cloning till you have the drive. DO NOT try to boot with 2 OS drives installed. Also remember that there should be a BIOS setting for boot drive priority that will need to be changed after the cloning, and disconnect the old IDE drive before booting to Windows.

An alternative is to image instead of cloning, but it requires a drive to store the image on.

 

Ooppss!!! There was a jumber set the wrong way so SATA was disabled

Once that was fixed, Windows found new hardware and installed the driver from the CD.
Once again thanks for your directions. I was ready to give up.

Cheers!

 

When I did this I installed the new drive as a spare on the existing - installed the driver - so you now have old drive plus new blank drive that is mounted

I then cloned the existing drive with the required driver rebooted to the new drive. Disconnected the old drive and booted


Worked out very easy