SATA Hard drives
Discussion
judas said:
You could make it bootable, but you may need to re-install Windows on the SATA drive to do this...
Noooooo! Run away! Run away!
I had a bad experience trying to make a SATA drive the main boot disc...
Judas, the first one is a learning curve… done quite a few now.. So not so bad
… in fact the latest toy has two 160GB SATA drives… 
I have a single 400GB SATA HDD in MY PC and have successfully connected older HDD's via the EIDE interface to copy stuff over. They were only connected temporarily, but worked a treat.
Because they are on a different physical interface, there may be two boot order settings in your BIOS. A drive boot order and an interface boot order. If so, make sure you set both.
Because they are on a different physical interface, there may be two boot order settings in your BIOS. A drive boot order and an interface boot order. If so, make sure you set both.
Podie said:
Podie said:
You could make it bootable, but you may need to re-install Windows on the SATA drive to do this...
Noooooo! Run away! Run away!
I had a bad experience trying to make a SATA drive the main boot disc...
Judas, the first one is a learning curve… done quite a few now.. So not so bad
I haven't tried it, but couldn't you "Ghost" over the EIDE drive to the SATA and then change boot order and be in business?
ErnestM
Done this myself 
. I had a few initial issues with getting it to boot from the SATA as the legacy boot bios on the IDE drive wanted to take charge all the time . One thing that finaly sorted it was loading the latest MB BIOS 
, which I presume recognised there was a problem with the system as shipped and corrected it.
Harry
. I had a few initial issues with getting it to boot from the SATA as the legacy boot bios on the IDE drive wanted to take charge all the time . One thing that finaly sorted it was loading the latest MB BIOS , which I presume recognised there was a problem with the system as shipped and corrected it. Harry
Best way to boot from a SATA drive without reloading windows is by using a drive cloning program. (It'll probably cost you about £20).
This will copy ALL the information including the MBR to the SATA drive.
I did it recently to my brother-in-laws PC. We installed a Raptor SATA and cloned the old drive to the new one. We then removed the old drive and using the Windows XP Recovery Console, rebuilt the MBR. Rebooted again and voila!
Now to remove the data from the IDE drive we plug it back in to find it's taken over the SATA drive. No problems there!
You need to boot up with an old MS-DOS floppy (www.bootdisk.com), and then remove the partitions from the old drive. Reboot and nothing will happen....
Now reconnect all the drives again and the SATA drive will boot up. Once in Windows, partition the old IDE drive and format as necessary and you'll have both drives working side by side perfectly.
Sounds long winded but it's a heck of a lot quicker than reinstalled XP!
Good luck!
This will copy ALL the information including the MBR to the SATA drive.
I did it recently to my brother-in-laws PC. We installed a Raptor SATA and cloned the old drive to the new one. We then removed the old drive and using the Windows XP Recovery Console, rebuilt the MBR. Rebooted again and voila!
Now to remove the data from the IDE drive we plug it back in to find it's taken over the SATA drive. No problems there!
You need to boot up with an old MS-DOS floppy (www.bootdisk.com), and then remove the partitions from the old drive. Reboot and nothing will happen....
Now reconnect all the drives again and the SATA drive will boot up. Once in Windows, partition the old IDE drive and format as necessary and you'll have both drives working side by side perfectly.
Sounds long winded but it's a heck of a lot quicker than reinstalled XP!
Good luck!
Chim450 said:
Thanks guys! I have a hard drive cloning program (casper) which I used when I upgraded to a larger hard drive. I will give it a try.
BTW how much quicker is a RAID setup compared to a single SATA drive?
If you get it right, fast as fook!
Pc Pro did a test in the May issue - which found that two SATA drives under certain circumstances were actually more than twice as fast as a single disk - work that out if you can!
edited to correct myself
actually it says almost twice as fast. Still two cheap SATA small drives will kick the crap out of one expensive big one. Food for thought.
>> Edited by _Dobbo_ on Wednesday 30th March 18:24
Chim450 said:
Thanks guys! I have a hard drive cloning program (casper) which I used when I upgraded to a larger hard drive. I will give it a try.
BTW how much quicker is a RAID setup compared to a single SATA drive?
Yeah. Ideally you want two 10K rpm Raptor drives in RAID 0. The drives alone achieve 53MB/sec which is faster than a lot of SCSI Ultra Wide drives (which is lightning quick), so if you have a decent RAID controller, you'll get a theoretical 106MB/sec! That's about as fast as some high end servers! Plus they have an access time of 4ms which again is stupidly quick.
Only problem with this configuration is that it'll cost you just under £400! (Plus you'll want some very decent SATA cables).
Anyhow.....good luck and enjoy!
BACKUP! 
Might be good for my video editing...
. Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff