sata help!!!!

[anthony99]

hi i need some help....i bought a new sata hard drive by mistake ......
i have a
athlon xp3000xp
asus a7n8x-e
1 gb ddr
120gb seagate pata drive
20gb seagate drive......
what will i need to buy to install this new drive into my system
do u have to install "2" sata drives at once or can u just install 1
will i need a pci controller and what leads will i need to buy..
as i dont have any connectors and im not sure if my psu will support the power connector either...
i was going to set this new drive up as my primary and use the old one for storage....
is this possible...
im a bit of a newbie as u can prob tell so any help will be much appreciated....thanks

 

[anthony99]

yeh my new sata drive is a 250gb seagate barrauda and my motherboard does support sata.....can i have an ide drive and a sata one on the same system????...god this is a little confusing

 

[paparazi]

You will need to buy two cables:
An actual SATA data cable and a SATA power cable adapter, which has a female molex one end and SATA power plug the other to plug into a standard power supply male molex.

Yes one SATA HDD can be used as boot drive with a standard ATA drive for storage, however, the trouble starts when the existing ATA drive is bootable and you try to install your OS on the SATA.

Motherboards will always tend to boot from an ATA drive first (before SATA) so ideally you should back up all your data on an external drive or CDR's and format the old drive first (there are several ways but this might be the easiest for you)
Once you have two blank disks connected (SATA & ATA) boot with XP in the drive, right at the beginning of XP install it asks if you are using any third party drivers and says "PRESS F6" (it only gives you 3/4seconds, so be quick)Insert your SATA floppy driver disk (YOU MAY NEED TO HAVE PREPARED THIS BEFORE HAND IF THE MOTHERBOARD WASN'T SUPPLIED WITH ONE READY MADE) this driver can be extracted to floppy from the motherboard driver disk.
Sellect and install the correct SATA driver and continue with install.
Hopefully both disks will be recognised, sellect 250GB Seagate disk, partition as required, format and finish XP install.
Make sure the SATA drive is set first in the bios boot sequence and the SATA controllers are enabled (usually are as default)
Transfer backed up files to second (older) drive.
Martin


We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[anthony99]

thanks paparazi
..in regards to the boot problem...i wanna keep all my files on the 120gb drive so cant i boot using my 20gb drive "i have winxp on both my present drives"and manually delete the windows files so the 120gb drive wont be bootable when i install the sata drive and just disgard the the 20gb drive.....would this be a fair way of getting round that problem....

 

[anthony99]

looks like my psu has sata power connectors!!! thats good news!

 

[anthony99]

wayhey!!! have found the serial connectors after much routing around...looks like im ready to start installin...thought i was gonna have to go buy some! now the fun begins!