HDD slave or primary

russtobin

russtobin

russtobin

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Joined
25 Sep 2010
Posts
58
Can anyone please advise how to change the primary and slave HDD status in the bios for the following?

At the moment it's got the Samsung HDD as primary and the SSD as slave - I want it the other way around.

I'm running;

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R
OCZ Vertex 2E Bigfoot 120GB 3.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache
 
you need to change the boot order, dont think it's called slave and master anymore
load up bios, and somewhere in the basic options should be boot order, change the drives around in there ;)
 
There is no concept of master/slave with SATA although some BIOSes do report it simply for ease of identification. As long as the boot order is correct there's no difference in how the drives behave.

However, disconnect the HDD before you install Windows. That way you can be sure that all the files end up on the SSD, Windows will put the boot files on whatever device enumerates as disk0, regardless of what you say in the installer.
 
rpstewart said:
However, disconnect the HDD before you install Windows. That way you can be sure that all the files end up on the SSD, Windows will put the boot files on whatever device enumerates as disk0, regardless of what you say in the installer.
Click to expand...

This. It will cause loads of bother if you do not!
 
It sounds like your drive controller is in IDE emulation mode - the "master" and "slave" designations are just a convention and don't actually mean anything for SATA drives, but you'll probably want to switch to AHCI anyway if you're using an SSD. :)
 
Think you have to set AHCI before installing OS or it wont boot - at least that was the case when i did a reinstall and forgot to set it in the bios first. Allthough to be honest I haven't noticed any difference between having it set to AHCI or not - maybe a file transfer takes 0.5 seconds longer but I really couldn't say.
 
Yes. And do unplug the other drive(s) before you start, as the other guys have said, or you may suffer much bother. :D

Also, don't forget to install the latest Intel RST drivers once your OS is up and running.
 
If you try to load an installed OS *after* switching from IDE emulation to AHCI then yes, it will BSOD - there's a workaround, but you'll presumably be wanting a clean install anyway.
 
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