IDE to SATA... what do i need to do here?

Insanity

Insanity

Insanity

Associate
Joined
5 Jun 2005
Posts
1,753
Location
Tasmania (Australia)
IDE to SATA... (Updated: Need help)

I've just bought myself my first SATA drive, thing is its second hand and didnt come with drivers and junk, its just the drive itself.

Its gonna be the only hard drive i'll be running (2 partitions), but im not entirely sure on the install proceedure. Somebody told me these drives need their own set of drivers to work, unlike IDE drives which are pretty much plug-and-play. But what drivers do i need?

The HDD i have is a WD3000JD (Western Digital 300GB SATA), and to be honest the WD driver page confused the hell outta me. 1st Gen, 2nd Gen?! Those arent written on the sticker!

So basically what i wanna know is, which drivers do i need, and whats the proceedure for installing them on a clean drive? I mean, i think windows prompts for SATA drives during the install, so do i just bang in a floppy with the drivers on it?

Damn second hand stuff, he could have included the manual. :mad:

Thanks!
 
Last edited:
Insanity said:
I've just bought myself my first SATA drive, thing is its second hand and didnt come with drivers and junk, its just the drive itself.
Click to expand...
Hard drives, even new ones come like that m8. Drivers are provided by your motherboard maker, & in most cases Windows XP (SP2) might not require them.

From here, this.
 
Yah, should do with no problems. Only thing is you have to reinstall Windows because you're moving to a new technology/etc.

Have the same setup, i.e. SATA + PATA (a.k.a. IDE). The PATA was my main hard disk, now use it as PAGEFILE/SWAP drive and for Backing Up the SATA one.
 
The main thing to remember(Not really an issue as you're only having one harddrive) Is to detach all the other harddrives and/or cardreader etc when installing windows, so as to ensure windows ends up on C:\, rather than being pushed along by other drives.
 
messiah khan said:
The main thing to remember(Not really an issue as you're only having one harddrive) Is to detach all the other harddrives and/or cardreader etc when installing windows, so as to ensure windows ends up on C:\, rather than being pushed along by other drives.
Click to expand...
What for m8? You can manual assign which drive Windows installs on. Removing those other drives, etc might bring problems, in that Windows will not pick them up when installing!
 
Well, the process is gonna go like this: (fingers crossed)

- Rip my side panel off and install the SATA drive (with the IDE drive still in there)
- Make sure the SATA is being detected by the bios
- Install the SATA drivers if i need to
- Partition the SATA drive into two drives and format em both to NTFS
- Transfer about 50gb to the second partition (D:\)
- Rip the IDE drive out
- Format the first partition again if it needs it (which it shouldnt)
- Install windows on the first partition (should be C:\ once the IDE drive is taken out)
- Hope for the best :rolleyes:

That sounds about right to me anyway...
 
OMFG! Argh! I hate computers... seriously.

I need to atleast get it into windows so i can partition it and transfer about 50gb to a partition before i go and remove my old drive and reinstall windows on the new one.

And here's the problem.... it wont boot. Everytime i try to boot up with the molex connected, it blue screens and resets the computer, this happens when i try to boot in safe mode too, but it is being detected in the bios. So i thought, maybe i need the SATA drivers installed first, no biggy. I ripped the molex out, it booted fine, so i chucked in the floppy, went to open it to find the SATA drivers, only to be greated with:

A:\ is not accessable

No ID address mark was found on the floppy disk.

This is the disk that came with my board.... WTF! :mad:

Im stuck, not to mention annoyed... what do i do now? =/
 
Well the last one i bought had a little jumper diagrams and crap, but anyway... im still no closer to fixing the problem.

I tried using Combined Mode, that did nothing. And Albatron dont seem to have the SATA drivers on their site to download.... they have everything else though. :rolleyes:
 
Last edited:
If im reading your posts correctly, could you not remove the IDE drive and only have the SATA drive installed, partition it and install windows from the XP setup CD, then once youve got windows installed on partition 1 of the new drive, reattatch the IDE drive and copy what you need on to partition2 of the SATA drive. Im not sure if this will help your BSOD problem, but its another angle of attack so you never know, it might work. Good luck.
 
Insanity said:
Well the last one i bought had a little jumper diagrams and crap, but anyway... im still no closer to fixing the problem.

I tried using Combined Mode, that did nothing. And Albatron dont seem to have the SATA drivers on their site to download.... they have everything else though. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
m8, what motherboard is that?

I also get the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), if I don't hit F6 & install SATA drivers from floppy. Thing is my board, an Asus A8V Deluxe uses VIA RAID (K8T880Pro) so I normally get the drivers from them, i.e VIA Arena.
 
Last edited:
Its an Albatron board.

Im gonna try an install on the SATA drive now, minus the floppy part if the damn disk decides not to work in DOS aswell and minus the IDE drive, if it all works i should be able to hook the IDE drive back up to transfer my stuff over... well, thats the theory anyway.

I'll be installing Windows XP Pro with SP2 intergrated, so hopefully it'll already have all the drivers i need.
 
Alrighty, installing without the IDE drive connected worked a treat, have yet to hook it up again to transfer my stuff back over, if worst comes to worst i'll have to run the IDE drive alone again and burn everything to DVD.

Oh, and i didnt need to use the floppy. :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom