Adding a 2nd SATA hard drive
Discussion
I wanted to upgrade my hard drive to a bigger last week - and although I succeeded, it was most definitely not the method I expected to!
What I was trying to do:
Simply add in a 2nd SATA drive onto the spare SATA header, reboot machine, check BIOS OK, proceed to booting up into Windows. Then was going to set the disk up in Disk Manager, and clone disk to disk using Norton Ghost (which needs to reboot the machine into DOS to complete this)
Result:
Boot up screen showed both SATA drives installed, but machine would not boot as it seemed to place the new (empty) disk ahead of the disk with Windows when booting up. Went into BIOS, no option to individually highlight the 2 disks and select the priority between these. Checked BIOS version and I have the latest.
What I did:
Set up a temporary RAID configuration. Mirrored the existing disk (source) over to the new one (mirror). Took out old disk, rebooted, and then delete the RAID configuration.
Result:
Copied the disk over - but nearly had a heart attack incase I hit the wrong key and cloned the blank drive over 8 years of data on the old drive!
I have since reformatted the old drive and put into an external caddy type case (SATA and USB interfaces) that is portable and can be used to make back ups. What I find still is that I cannot boot the PC with this drive attached and switched on - but I can switch on after the machine has finished booting and it can access the drive quite happily.
Q1. How can I make it so that I can boot the machine with this disk switched on and connected (again, it can be seen on the start up screes)
Q2. If I wanted, how do I add an extra SATA disk e.g. if I want a permanent D drive as well as C drive - so there are two distinct drives, just like you would get if using IDE type drives, or 1 IDE + 1 SATA. Do you have to use the RAID BIOS to do this and set up a JBOD? (Just a Bunch of Disks)?
Its all new to me, and although I have never had bother with SATA before, this is the first time I had attempted to have 2 in the same machine.
Ta.
What I was trying to do:
Simply add in a 2nd SATA drive onto the spare SATA header, reboot machine, check BIOS OK, proceed to booting up into Windows. Then was going to set the disk up in Disk Manager, and clone disk to disk using Norton Ghost (which needs to reboot the machine into DOS to complete this)
Result:
Boot up screen showed both SATA drives installed, but machine would not boot as it seemed to place the new (empty) disk ahead of the disk with Windows when booting up. Went into BIOS, no option to individually highlight the 2 disks and select the priority between these. Checked BIOS version and I have the latest.
What I did:
Set up a temporary RAID configuration. Mirrored the existing disk (source) over to the new one (mirror). Took out old disk, rebooted, and then delete the RAID configuration.
Result:
Copied the disk over - but nearly had a heart attack incase I hit the wrong key and cloned the blank drive over 8 years of data on the old drive!
I have since reformatted the old drive and put into an external caddy type case (SATA and USB interfaces) that is portable and can be used to make back ups. What I find still is that I cannot boot the PC with this drive attached and switched on - but I can switch on after the machine has finished booting and it can access the drive quite happily.
Q1. How can I make it so that I can boot the machine with this disk switched on and connected (again, it can be seen on the start up screes)
Q2. If I wanted, how do I add an extra SATA disk e.g. if I want a permanent D drive as well as C drive - so there are two distinct drives, just like you would get if using IDE type drives, or 1 IDE + 1 SATA. Do you have to use the RAID BIOS to do this and set up a JBOD? (Just a Bunch of Disks)?
Its all new to me, and although I have never had bother with SATA before, this is the first time I had attempted to have 2 in the same machine.
Ta.
Edited by TUS 373 on Wednesday 5th July 23:04
On my ABit 3rd eye motherboard I have 4 sata headers and can choose from the BIOS which priority order they are booted from. If you have that wrong but just one drive it will still work as it will be checked in order. But add another drive and it will be ahead in the seek chain...
Discovered this recently on upgrading my BIOS - the old one had fixed priority order, on the new one you could change it. Heart palpitations and some heavy sweating were the order of the day on booting up and finding I had no operating system....but a quick scour of the BIOS settings brought the culprit to light *phew*
Either change in the bios or more simply you should be able to just swap the SATA cables over the put your boot drive on the higher priority header.....
Discovered this recently on upgrading my BIOS - the old one had fixed priority order, on the new one you could change it. Heart palpitations and some heavy sweating were the order of the day on booting up and finding I had no operating system....but a quick scour of the BIOS settings brought the culprit to light *phew*
Either change in the bios or more simply you should be able to just swap the SATA cables over the put your boot drive on the higher priority header.....
Edited by bigdods on Thursday 6th July 17:25
OK, done that. Under advanced settings, I can set the hard disk priority between "Bootable add-in device" and "Usb disk". The first is my SATA 1 boot drive, the USB is purely the data (snd SATA) drive.
When I boot with that configuration, I get "NTLDR is missing" and "press CTRL ALT DEL" to continue.
To me, this suggests that the BIOS is STILL trying to boot from the non-bootable disk. However, even if this is the case, I would still expect it to go down the chain and pick the next bootable device. Weird problem, and I'm usually OK with BIOS stuff.
When I boot with that configuration, I get "NTLDR is missing" and "press CTRL ALT DEL" to continue.
To me, this suggests that the BIOS is STILL trying to boot from the non-bootable disk. However, even if this is the case, I would still expect it to go down the chain and pick the next bootable device. Weird problem, and I'm usually OK with BIOS stuff.
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