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#1
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Adding 1 SATA data drive to existing system???
I've been searching and searching and cannot find a straight answer to this question but there are a lot of different comments about it. My current setup is an A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard with 2 PATA disks on the primary IDE controller and 2 CD/DVD drives on the secondary IDE controller. The master PATA drive is partitioned into C (Fat32) and E (NTFS) and contains Win98SE and Win2000 dual boot. The slave PATA drive is a single NTFS partition D. The CD/DVDs are drives F and G. I need more hard drive space and want to add a SATA drive since I have the capability. I only want to use it for extra space, not to boot from it or to use in a RAID configuration. Just for extra NTFS formatted space.. What do I need to do? Just plug it in? Do I need to load any special drivers? I plan to format it as one NTFS partition. How will the BIOS detect it? As a boot drive or an extra drive? How will Win2000 detect it, as drive H? I just don't want the BIOS to get confused or to screw up my current dual boot settings or my existing PATA drive assignments. Thanks for any suggestions. |
#2
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From your Mobo CD install the SATA drivers
then just plug your Sata drive in. When you are in XP go to Control Panel/administrative tools/computer management/disk management the drive should be listed there.........you will need to format it in order to use it. peter wrote in message ... I've been searching and searching and cannot find a straight answer to this question but there are a lot of different comments about it. My current setup is an A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard with 2 PATA disks on the primary IDE controller and 2 CD/DVD drives on the secondary IDE controller. The master PATA drive is partitioned into C (Fat32) and E (NTFS) and contains Win98SE and Win2000 dual boot. The slave PATA drive is a single NTFS partition D. The CD/DVDs are drives F and G. I need more hard drive space and want to add a SATA drive since I have the capability. I only want to use it for extra space, not to boot from it or to use in a RAID configuration. Just for extra NTFS formatted space.. What do I need to do? Just plug it in? Do I need to load any special drivers? I plan to format it as one NTFS partition. How will the BIOS detect it? As a boot drive or an extra drive? How will Win2000 detect it, as drive H? I just don't want the BIOS to get confused or to screw up my current dual boot settings or my existing PATA drive assignments. Thanks for any suggestions. |
#3
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I read your manual.........if you have the proper drive set up as 1st boot
device you should be fine. peter wrote in message ... Okay, I have Win2000, but I know about the disk management tool. So are you sure the BIOS isn't going to see the drive as a boot drive? On Sat, 05 Feb 2005 01:55:04 GMT, "peter" wrote: From your Mobo CD install the SATA drivers then just plug your Sata drive in. When you are in XP go to Control Panel/administrative tools/computer management/disk management the drive should be listed there.........you will need to format it in order to use it. peter wrote in message . .. I've been searching and searching and cannot find a straight answer to this question but there are a lot of different comments about it. My current setup is an A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard with 2 PATA disks on the primary IDE controller and 2 CD/DVD drives on the secondary IDE controller. The master PATA drive is partitioned into C (Fat32) and E (NTFS) and contains Win98SE and Win2000 dual boot. The slave PATA drive is a single NTFS partition D. The CD/DVDs are drives F and G. I need more hard drive space and want to add a SATA drive since I have the capability. I only want to use it for extra space, not to boot from it or to use in a RAID configuration. Just for extra NTFS formatted space.. What do I need to do? Just plug it in? Do I need to load any special drivers? I plan to format it as one NTFS partition. How will the BIOS detect it? As a boot drive or an extra drive? How will Win2000 detect it, as drive H? I just don't want the BIOS to get confused or to screw up my current dual boot settings or my existing PATA drive assignments. Thanks for any suggestions. |
#4
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Hello !
You wrote that you're using Win98 as one of the OS in your system. You should take into consideration that the SATA disks appear as SCSI disks to your OS - and this means that those new disks will be pushed to the front. The former "D", "E", "F" and so on will slip behind the partitions of the new SATA disks. Not bad as long as you don't have software pieces that rely on the drive letters. In my system I experienced trouble since the Adobe Album software didn't find my photos any longer after the SATA installation . The Win2000 and all the newer Wins should be able to assign any letters. Hth Michael |
#5
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Well it's a non-issue for the Win98SE installation anyway since I formatted the entire SATA drive as NTFS. I purchased and installed the drive over the weekend and it went trouble free. Thanks to everyone that responded. In case anyone is interested, all I needed to do was shutdown and enable the SATA controller on the MB, reboot and install the Sil driver for Win2k, shutdown again and install the HD, then boot up into Win2k and go to the disk manager to "initialize" and format it NTFS. The thing that took the longest was formatting the drive. Everything else was quick and pain free. I'm not sure why a lot of people have problems with SATA and PATA drive mixtures. On 7 Feb 2005 04:50:49 -0800, (Michael Sikorski) wrote: Hello ! You wrote that you're using Win98 as one of the OS in your system. You should take into consideration that the SATA disks appear as SCSI disks to your OS - and this means that those new disks will be pushed to the front. The former "D", "E", "F" and so on will slip behind the partitions of the new SATA disks. Not bad as long as you don't have software pieces that rely on the drive letters. In my system I experienced trouble since the Adobe Album software didn't find my photos any longer after the SATA installation . The Win2000 and all the newer Wins should be able to assign any letters. Hth Michael |
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