Storage Drivers - PnP and F6

We've seen a lot of users having problems with storage drivers in Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Mostly with SATA drives, either in RAID or normal mode. Windows x64 Edition does have native SATA support in the OS. But the problem is that many motherboards combine their SATA and RAID controller into one, and this means you're going to need a driver for it, as we discussed earlier. But now, as folks are starting to get used to using F6, and drivers are becoming available, we're seeing problems that show up later in the process. So let's see if we can help a bit.

When you install XP, both 32-bit and 64-bit, you are using text mode drivers. These drivers, which are controlled by the file TXTSETUP.OEM, need to either be in the operating system, or you need to use F6 to tell the OS about them. (OK, you could slipstream them as well, but then you've basically put them into the operating system.)

During text mode, the drivers are explicitly loaded. But when you first boot up to the GUI mode login, Plug and Play comes into effect, and now the <somename>.INF file is used. No longer is the explicit load and F6 doing the job for you -- the drivers need to have the correct PnP enumerators to load correctly. This was a major problem with some drivers during the transition from Beta to Release, when the decoration requirements got tighter for PnP storate drivers. During the early stage of startup, PnP doesn't come into play, and the boot process will proceed. But, just about the time that it flips over into full GUI mode, it switches over to PnP for all drivers. If, at this point, the PnP enumeration for your storage controller fails, Windows XP can't see your hard drive, and it immediately crashes and reboots. (You can control the automatic reboot behaviour to hold it at the failure point so you can see it by setting this using F8 just at the very beginning of the Windows startup process.)

So, if you have managed to get x64 Edition of Windows to load by using F6 and a floppy, but then it reboots when it first comes up into GUI mode - it's back to your driver source for an updated x64 Edition driver.