Sata and IDE Drives Issues

Article Last Updated: 6^th Apr 2009
Posted by Ruhani Rabin in Windows | Comments | |

I’ve got a new motherboard for my computer recently. It’s a Gigabyte GA-965G DS3 series motherboard which comes with 4 sata II ports and 2 onboard sata II ports which provides 3GB/s specifications. Well I’ve gone through a number of troubles migrating to my new sata II drive. My previous drive is a IDE ATA Seagate 160GB drive which has 5 separate partitions and loaded with Windows XP and another partition is loaded with Vista ultimate. So as I got my new sata drive which is a 320GB sata II drive, I decided to put it as my first drive ( Disk 0 ) and the other IDE channel is assigned to disk 4. Both were master drives and mother preferences were set to give the main priority at the sata drive for booting. Anyway I did a cloning using Acronis True Image and cloned the whole drive into the new 320GB drive. After that I found out that the IDE drive is still booting and the 320GB sata drive is setting itself as second preference. So I dig out information regarding this and found out the facts lies beneath.. Here is some of the facts :

• IDE drives always have a master preference for boot up device unless you set the drive jumper settings to slave.
• If you want to install Windows XP into a sata drive, you need to set the sata preference as "Legacy IDE" at motherboard options.
• Gigabyte onboard SATA II ports are hot swap able, similar to USB drives and it’s not recognized by windows as a fixed drive, it represent’s itself as removable drives.
• To re-install Windows XP on a sata drive, it’s best to remove the IDE drive before starting the installation process. After installing windows on a Sata disk, go to manage computer and disk management, setup your drive letter for the Windows partition manually. Shut down and enable your IDE drive then start your computer again.
• If you need to use sata raid drives and you don’t have a floppy drive you might have some serious problems installing the drivers while pressing F3. Possible working alternative is to build a new windows XP installation CD which includes the OEM sata drivers included.

Feel Free to share your own Experiences and facts.

• Using Windows XP and Vista in a Same Computer
• Best Windows Freeware – Portable Applications Suite
• Speed up your System – IObit SmartDefrag 5.00 Beta
• TrueCrypt create your own secure storage
• Microsoft and Their Inevitable BSOD
• JkDefrag – Optimize you harddisk for free
• PHP Apache MySQL Web Server for USB Disks
• Get back the control of your registry from Trojans

About Ruhani Rabin

Ruhani Rabin is the original owner and author of this blog. He also reviews web 2.0 startups at Tech2all.com. Largely interested in web 2.0 apps & Social Media. Currently the Vice President of MOL Access Portal (MOL is owner of Friendster.com). Also he is Web 2.0 & Social Media Researcher and a Total fun Geek!.. There you have it ;)

Twitter Profile: http://twitter.com/ruhanirabin