SATA Drives

[lara19]

I recently upgradrd my motherboard. I have a new SATA drive which i use as my primary drive and install the os . When i tried to install my old ide hardrive to recover my backup i the comp starts from my old rive. I tried to configure my bios to detect my sata drive as first boot but its not available. I tried using my cdrom as my first boot (it works ok)but when i tried to configure the second boot to my sata drive the sata drive is not available again only my old ide drive, floppy and cd rom is available as a second boot options . My sata drive is available only as my 4th boot drive. How can i use my sata drive as second boot? I use P4P800s se motherboard

 

[wolluf]

You don't give your mobo - but on mine, SCSI equates to SATA in boot sequence set up. And each of the boot options (1st 2nd 3rd etc) can be set to any of the available devices. Older boards usually have a number of set options you can cycle through - but it will depend on the board and type of bios what's available. Presume it boots without IDE drive present, as you said you use as primary with o/s.

If you give your board, someone with experience of it may be able to help you (and if you could describe what options are available in the bios for setting the boot sequence)

 

[lara19]

Can i put my old drive Seagate 40G 7200 rpm inmy secondary ide and put my dvd and cdwriter in my primary drive?

 

[wolluf]

Can you clarify what you're asking please - I'm getting lost! From your second post, you can physically attach any 2 IDE devices to either primary or secondary IDE controllers on the mobo - so you can conect DVD & CD writer to primary IDE and Hard drive to secondary (but as you should also be able to specifiy exactly which order machine looks for boot devices, can't see that it matters).

You've not given any more info to enable us to help with you boot sequence problem.

 

[lara19]

This is what it looks like in my BIOS when i put my old ATA hardisk:
First Boot [crw] [st340xxx - this is my ata drive][floppy] i selected crw here
Second boot - same options (no sata drive available in the options)
Third boot - same options
Fourth boot - same options and my sata drive is available from this point

How can i make my sata drive available in my options in first, second and third boot?

If i remove my old ATA drive the sata drive is available in all options.

My other question is that my mobo has two ide connectors (primary and secondary) is it ok if i put my dvd and cdwriter in primary and put my old ata drive in secondary?

 

[micker377]

Again we need the model of the mobo. Is this a new mobo, or an IDE with an add-in SATA driver board?

 

[lara19]

Asus p4p800s se

I tried installing my old ide in the secodary ide connector (after disconnecting my dvd drives) and same thing happens. my comp boots from my old drives which i dont like to happen, I just want to retrieve file from my old drives)

 

[pweegar]

lara19:
Yes, you CAN connect your dvd/cd-rom as your primary, but why would you want to? Doing this and connecting your hd as a slave will affect your hd performance as it'll slow way down. ALWAYS make your fastest device the master and slower drives as the slave.

I believe the problem your having has to do with the fact that your motherboard doesn't really know what to do with the SATA drive. For even more fun, try adding an empty IDE hd to your system. You won't even be able to boot!! I know, I've done this. Have a system that was loaded on a SATA drive. Win2k loaded just fine. Then I thought I would add an empty 60 gig IDE HD to install linux. System refused to find the OS. So, with both drives installed, I deleted all partition and reinstalled Win2k to my SATA. However at the beginning of the install, I got a message that some data was going to be written to the IDE HD and the install completed successfully. I now boot from the SATA, and the other drive is available (and has Linux loaded).

 

[wolluf]

lar19 - looking at the manual for your mobo, it does have restrictions on use of SATA and IDE at the same time - though I'm not sure how they fit with what you're seeing (and it only seems to apply when you've win9x/ME/NT or linux installed - what's on your old IDE drive?). Have you set anything in the bios for this?

 

[lara19]

Music and downloaded updates and new drivers is in my old IDE drive. I tried putting it in my secondary ide connector but still the same message appears as NTLDR missing so that means my comp is booting from my old ide hardrive. I just want to copy the files in my old ide drive then remove it.

 

[wolluf]

So have you checked settings in the bios as mentioned in the mobo manual (which I found on Asus site - so presumably you have a copy)?

For what you want to do, I'd just install whatever o/s you're using temporarily on the IDE drive (when SATA drive disconnected). Then connect SATA drive, boot from IDE and copy the files from IDE to SATA. Remove IDE & voila you should have what you want (if XP, you don't need to activate it on IDE drive as only using it for a short while to do the copy).

 

[lara19]

I cant do that coz it will erase the data in my old hardisk. I've checked the manual and i did whats instructed. I use winxp so its configured in enhanced mode.

 

[wolluf]

You should be able to install XP on the old disk without formatting it (if its fat32 or ntfs created by XP). This won't erase your data.

If you can't do this, how about trying a boot manager?

http://www.boot-us.com

will let you install a boot menu to floppy. You can install its GUI in the SATA installation and set up floppy from there (with just XP on the SATA on the menu). Then connect the IDE drive, but use the boot floppy to boot. Hopefully, when you select the only option (XP on the SATA drive), it will recognise the SATA drive and boot XP, allowing you to copy from IDE (it may not - it may still try to boot from the IDE - but worth a try).

 

[lara19]

Ill give it a try. Thanks