SATA Drive With A PCI Card

[iamheretolearn]

I have a pentium 3, 733mhz system. My motherboard is limited to 80gb hard disk capacity. To get around the problem I have installed a new PCI SATA card and a new 200gb hard disk for additional storage.

I have three drives in my computer now, two IDE and one SATA.

I need to reformat my computer as there are some bugs and I need a fresh install. I have a lot of files on my new SATA drive. Am I going to need to reformat/activate this drive again which means loosing data when I format my OS drive (C Drive)? I can not run the risk of loosing the data on the SATA Drive, C and D are backed up.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Frank4d]

If you are only reformating the C:\ drive (one of the IDE drives I believe) then the SATA drive is not at risk so long as you format the correct drive.

 

[iamheretolearn]

Thanks for that Frank4d.

What I am concerned about is that you need to install the driver to access the SATA drive, and the only way accessing the drive is by formatting the SATA drive. Once I do that I will loose my existing data.

Is this correct?

I am using Windows XP Pro.

 

[cdogg]

It depends on the PCI card. You are correct that within Windows, the correct driver must be installed to access the drive.

However, a decent PCI controller card whether it be IDE or SATA should have a built-in ROM that works with your BIOS. If yours has that, then you should see an additional option at startup to enter the PCI card's setup. From there, you can work with settings on which drive the system will boot from.

For example, my Highpoint PCI card prompts me to hit CTRL-H at startup to view attached devices. I would still go into the BIOS to select the boot order.


Your best option might be to create additional "logical" partitions on your SATA drive using software like Partition Magic. With PM, you can resize existing partitions. As long as you have less than 100GB of data, you could create a 2nd partition and move everything over to that. Afterwards, resize the primary to your liking (less than 30GB). Then back on the primary, format it and install the OS.

Lost? I don't blame you. Feel free to ask about any part that sounds confusing...


~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind";
[tab][tab]- Aristotle
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[iamheretolearn]

Thanks for that cdogg.

I have a ST Lab's PCI SATA Raid Card with 2 Ports.

This is the link from the manufacturer:

http://www.st-lab.com/IDESI3112R.html

At the start up I can go into the card's menu by pressing Ctrl+S or F4. There are 4 options:

1. Create RAID set
2. Delete RAID Set
3. Rebuild Mirrored Set
4. Resolve conflicts

All this is to advance for me. What do these options do?
There is no option from where you can choose which drive the system will boot from as you mentioned.

In the motherboard's bios there is no option to boot from PCI card. Is that you were referring to?

I do have PM. I don't really want to partition or run my OS from this drive as I bascially use this drive for storage. However it will be a good option to have, I did not think that you could do this because of my motherboard's limitation.

If I can boot from it, I run the risk of loosing the data. There has to be a way around this problem.

Thanks in advance once again.

 

[Freestone]

...need to install the driver to access the SATA drive, and the only way accessing the drive is by formatting the SATA drive.

As cdogg mentioned, the driver must be loaded, more than likely by pressing F6 at the beginning of XP install and feeding it the driver diskette, which you've created beforehand.

The part I don't understand is, why do you say the only way to access the drive is by formatting it? The first time you used it, sure it had to be partitioned and formatted as it was a blank drive, but I don't understand why it would have to be formatted again since you are not going to install the OS on it.

 

[iamheretolearn]

The reason I say that the only way to access the drive is by formatting it is becuase my friend has the same configuration he end up loosing it. When you make the drive active in Administrative Tools it neeed to be reformatted for the system to see the drive.

This is what is scaring me, I don't want to loose my data. I guess I might have to roll the dice and see it myself.

Can you the Windows see it without having to reformat? If this is the case it solves my problems.

Thanks once again.

 

[cdogg]

The option to select your boot order is not within the card's setup menu. As I mentioned, you have to go into the BIOS to change that. Once there, you will notice that the PCI card is not an option to select. What you have to do is take both IDE hard drives out of the lineup leaving only the CDROM and/or floppy.

During POST, the system will first scan the boot order in the BIOS. When it doesn't find an OS, the PCI SATA card is next in line automatically.

Freestone has a good point as well. Since the drive is already formatted in the file system that you want, there's no need to format it again. If you just have one large 200GB partition with plenty of space, then I don't see why you can't just install Windows on top of what you have skipping the format. Try it and let us know if that works out or not.

PM is still a good piece of software to have for resizing and creating additional partitions. Down the road, you're not going to want everything on one huge partition. Think how long it would take to defragment!


~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind";
[tab][tab]- Aristotle
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[iamheretolearn]

Thanks for that cdogg. If I take your advice, partition it using PM, how do I get OS on it? It is ntfs at the moment, do I need to convert to FAT32 to be able to install OS on it and hope that it will run from this drive.

I am planning to restore a ghost image I saved earlier with a clean OS on it.

Thanks.

 

[cdogg]

Well, you can worry about partitioning later. If you are installing 2000 or XP, then don't worry about FAT32 - you don't need it.

Boot from the Windows CD and try installing the OS first.


~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind";
[tab][tab]- Aristotle
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[Freestone]

If you proceed down the road of installing the OS on your SATA drive, just be sure you do not choose the option of formatting your drive! Leave the partiton intact.

 

[iamheretolearn]

I installed the software on the second drive. Installed the driver for PCI card, XP recognised the drive immediately. There were no problems. All the data was there. I guess my friend must have done something wrong.

Thanks for your help guys.

 

[Freestone]

It's great to hear things worked out for you, and thanks for posting the results!