Having problems getting 2 x sata2 drives up and running

jamieuk23 · 6 Dec 2006 at 13:11

Hi first off all Would just like to thank any one who can help me out ! really do aprecaite.....

OK.. I have a Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherbaord and I all ready have a 500GB seagate sata2 hard drive installed at the minute which is my main drive with windows on etc. http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...rodid=MB-152-AS

I didnt install this drive my self as I had some problems so a freind did it for me. This drive is connected to the "RED" sata port on my motherboard.

I have just bought today 2 X 400GB samsung hard drives as I noticed there were 2 orange sata ports left on my motherbaord.

Now I would like to no how exactly do I install these 2 new Hard drives. as I have connected one of them and I get a error message saying somethen like " 4th master hard drive error please press F1 to reume".

Is it inportant to make sure these drives are slave drives ?? as you can see I am totaly lost here !!

Pleasssssssee ! help me

rpstewart · 6 Dec 2006 at 14:41

The orange ports are for the Silicon Image controller which is used for the EZ-RAID feature. While they can be used the manual is a bit vague as to how you run those ports in non RAID mode. You'd probably be better off using the two black ports for the Intel controller next to the red one your existing disk is using.

KurTz · 6 Dec 2006 at 14:48

Make the 2 new drives are slave, then go into your bios and set the booting priority of the hard drives, making sure you're C: is obviously first.

Dont think it would matter which ever SATA port you plug them into, don't quote me on that though as I've never had an ASUS board.

rpstewart · 6 Dec 2006 at 15:05

There's no such concept as master and slave with SATA disks because there's only one per cable.

Checking the boot order is a reasonable plan but since the OP's original disk is in SATA1 it's unlikely to change. You can't specify a drive letter to boot from since they're allocated by the OS, boot order will be done either by port or more usually by displaying the drive make and model.

The choice of SATA ports does matter, the Asus board in question has 3 different SATA controllers driving 7 ports. Since each controller has its own set of BIOS options you need to be careful which ports are used so that you know what settings are required in the BIOS.