How to change a HDD from slave to master?

Buffman · 24 May 2008 at 09:10

I'm currently using a p31-S3l motherboard and have two SATA channels, I have the 160GB HDD with windows as a master on one and my DVD drive on the other though I want the samsung drive as its own master with no slave so I can run a HDD capacity restore program as currently my computer reads it as 33mb even though its an f1 1tb, any fixes?

PhillyDee · 24 May 2008 at 09:33

If its sata, there is no master / slaves.

Buffman · 24 May 2008 at 09:52

PhillyDee said:
If its sata, there is no master / slaves.

Hmm well in my MOBO it says the IDE slave/master but they're all connected with SATA cables =/, I tried taking out the SATA dvd drive cable to see if it sorted itself out but the windows disk was still master and the F1 was still slave.
Edit managed to get both of them master but this utility:http://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-hard-drive-capacity/ still says there's more than one thing on the drives, so the samsung still has 33mb out of 1 terabyte available and will have to be replaced.

BlackBat · 25 May 2008 at 12:32

You MB SATA controllers are set to PATA mode by default, if you go into BIOS under advanced BIOS features and look for something like 'SATA RAID/AHCI Mode', you should you should find it 'disabled'. If you change it to 'AHCI' then it will configure the SATA controllers in AHCI mode, enabling NCQ and hot plug. This will stop you having to mess about with setting master/slave settings and mean all SATA devices can run to there optimum and not be held back by another device on the same channel.

AbsenceJam · 25 May 2008 at 12:40

Again, with SATA there is no master and slave. Doesn't matter what your BIOS says, each drive has its own channel.

I wouldn't recommend AHCI unless you need to hotswap your drives. NCQ degrades performance unless your computer is a server doing lots of I/O transactions, SATA ODD's and AHCI usually don't play nicely at all, and there are some other issues with AHCI depending on your hardware such as Intel controllers limiting the speed. Plus you would have to reinstall Windows. 'IDE' mode in the BIOS has nothing to do with PATA drives, it's just the standard way of presenting drives to the OS. AHCI and RAID are others.

nightwish · 25 May 2008 at 14:45

I don't know whether this is a standard problem, but I found that I cannot boot from my SATA dvd-drive in AHCI or RAID mode on my Abit IP35Pro (Intel ICH9R).

Reading around, it *may* be a problem with the bios on this board or it may be a wider issue with the Intel ICH9R chip.

Anyway, one less reason to set it to AHCI/RAID if you have one of these boards and a SATA dvd-drive.

PhillyDee · 25 May 2008 at 15:41

AHCI doesnt like my Optical drives.

Buffman · 25 May 2008 at 18:35

BlackBat said:
You MB SATA controllers are set to PATA mode by default, if you go into BIOS under advanced BIOS features and look for something like 'SATA RAID/AHCI Mode', you should you should find it 'disabled'. If you change it to 'AHCI' then it will configure the SATA controllers in AHCI mode, enabling NCQ and hot plug. This will stop you having to mess about with setting master/slave settings and mean all SATA devices can run to there optimum and not be held back by another device on the same channel.

It tells me the PATA/SATA mode and gives the options for:
Auto
Combined
non-combined
Disabled
Though I think I've already tried all of these and to no luck with the software :'(

Anyone got any other suggestions or software suggestions to allow the full 1tb to be seen in this hard drive rather than the current 33 mb? xD, it seems a well known problem with gigabyte boards but I can't see any particular fixes for my motherboard, I upgraded my bios to F7d but that didnt seem to help =/

AbsenceJam · 25 May 2008 at 18:51

What are you trying to do exactly?

Buffman · 25 May 2008 at 19:16

AbsenceJam said:
What are you trying to do exactly?

Use a 1tb samsung spinpoint f1 hard drive in my pc as the only drive in my pc, though I couldnt as the motherboard recognizes it as 33mb so I've tried to fix this problem by adding it to my current system and using this software: http://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-hard-drive-capacity/ (which tells me theres more than one drive on the SATA channel when there isnt, which means it wont run) and by upgrading my bios both of which haven't fixed the problem. So basically, anyone got any ideas to fix it? (I'm not going to coat it in mustard etc)