Hard Drive Setup

shodan · 8 Aug 2006 at 15:51

Does it matter whether hard drives are primary or not?

I have the Asus P5W DH Deluxe and I've got 2 sata hard drives. The hd with the OS is connected to the port 'sata-1' and is listed in the bios as the third master, whilst my IDE DVD writer (being the only IDE drive) is listed as the primary master. Does this matter? I'm having problems doing anything in XP as descibed here

Let me know if you think these are related. Thanks

Edit: The second sata HD is connected to the Jmicron controller and doesn't show up in the bios. It works fine in XP though.

Sinizterguy · 8 Aug 2006 at 15:54

Dont think it matters at all. I have two hard drives attached to my PC - one IDE and one SATA and I have 3-4 installs of windows over the two. The settings dont seem to matter.

Your other problems may be due to RAM (run memtest) or due to an insufficient PSU (which can give randoms errors at different times making you wonder whats going wrong).

shodan · 8 Aug 2006 at 16:41

Ok Thanks. Running memtest right now.

I'm using an Enermax Liberty 620W and the problems aren't random or intermittent so I'll presume it isn't that.

fenderbass86 · 8 Aug 2006 at 20:58

How did you get your second HD to work? My 80GB has my OS installed on it, but my 250GB HD isn't showing up in My Computer, only in the BIOS.

noxidjkram@hotm · 8 Aug 2006 at 21:13

fenderbass86 said:
How did you get your second HD to work? My 80GB has my OS installed on it, but my 250GB HD isn't showing up in My Computer, only in the BIOS.

Need to initialise the disk in disk management.

Right Click on my comuter and manage.

M

noxidjkram@hotm · 8 Aug 2006 at 21:15

And for SATA HDDs, its irrelevant whether they are primary or secondary.

That only mattered for IDE drives on the same physical wiring IIRC.

M