Driver for WD Caviar Green 640gb: Can't find it

Hi all,
I'm having some severe problems. Recently I had a HDD crash. I went out to the store, bought a 640gb WD Caviar Green HDD, however I am stuck at a blue screen in the Win XP setup as I can't find the driver for this HHD *anywhere*.
I have searched high and low on the internet, yes I have looked on Western Digitals drivers page, and it's just not there!
This is frustrating, how can they sell a HDD without any drivers to be found anywhere? Is there perhaps a generic WD HDD Driver I should be using?

Thanks a lot for any help you can provide,
S

 

Thankyou PeteC!
I didn't realise there would be a generic SATA driver on my mobo CD. I will give this a go and appreciate your help, sometimes the 'obvious' eludes those of us who don't know any better

 

Snape,

This is not going to be a generic driver. As Pete mentioned, this is a driver for your motherboard's SATA controller. While different, all load somewhat similarly and most motherboard driver discs will have a utility from which the appropriate floppy driver disk can be made for use following an F6 prompt during XP setup. Use windows explorer and navigate to the folder on the driver CD which references your SATA controller - that's the roadmap you need to follow. Also, some manufacturers will permit one to boot directly to the driver CD with a machine having no operating system and make the appropriate floppy or floppies from there.

 

Just to add a bit here for background - one of the primary, basic functions of any operating system is to communicate with some type of permanent storage, and this is done through a special I/O (input/output) hardware device called a "controller ". XP was programmed to support EIDE (now called PATA) controllers. EIDE is a protocol (communications software "standard "). Drives are built to "hardware" standards and use a protocol that operating systems are programmed to support. Drives don't have special features that require drivers. As noted by others, the controllers for the various protocols, do.

XP came out years before SATA drives so SATA controller and protocol support was not pre-programmed into XP. Fortunately, XP allows administrators to add support for the different protocols. This was typically done for SCSI drives and/or RAID arrays in servers, but the process to add SATA controller support works the same way.

So once XP is basically reprogrammed to support SATA controllers too, you will be able to use any SATA drive with that SATA controller.

At least you can be happy your motherboard apparently supports SATA as you were able to connect the data cable up to somewhere. Some folks with older boards have bought SATA drives only to find out their motherboards do not support it. Such are the woes you encounter when trying to take advantage of current hardware technologies with 8 year old operating systems and motherboards designed to support legacy DOS era peripherals and software.

 

A question: Is the hard drive actually connected to the motherboard directly, or to an add-on card on the board? If it's the latter, you should have an installation disc somewhere. I cannot help you any further, even though I have an almost identical drive that I just fitted, as I run Vista. If you don't have an add-on card, or have lost the disc, try going here.