New SATA drive

Dogboy73

Dogboy73

Dogboy73

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Joined
27 May 2004
Posts
693
Location
UK
I'm looking for a new internal drive to replace my ageing 40GB IDE. The drive size has never really been an issue so I reckon 80GB will be ample for my needs. Obviously I'd like a newer SATA drive as well.

I also have an Nforce3 based mobo (MSI Neo2 Platinum 2) & from research I've done it appears some SATA drives have problems with NForce3 boards. Is this the case?

And how simple will it be to install the actual drive & then install XP on this? is it as straightforward as installing an IDE? I understand there are 1 or 2 procedures that need to be carried out before you can install the drive? Is that right?

Thanks,
DB
 
Biscuity said:
I've had several MSI mobos in the past & they can be trouble. I'd suggest that you check on the excellent MSI forum just to make sure you won't get any probs.

http://forum.msi.com.tw/index.php?sid=
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I've had a quick scoot round on there. didn't find to much specific stuff about the mobo I have & Seagate SATA drives. someone was complaining that formatting his 300GB SATA seemed to be taking to long. Didn't say it didn't work though.


Just ordered myself an 80GB Seagate Barracuda & an NEC DVD burner (I don't currently have a DVD-RW drive). £62 the lot including VAT & delivery. Can't argue with that ;) For £10 more I could have bought a 160GB drive but I rekcon 80GB will do me fine. I have a 40GB IDE at the moment & I'm 4GB away from filling it for the first time since I bought my PC (about 6-7 years ago). Good house keeping is what it's all about ;)
 
I do play games but not that much. I tend to have 1 or 2 games installed at a time. At the moment I just have HL2 & CSS + a couple of SP 3rd party Source games. I mostly have music software like Reason & Sound Forge. That doesn't take up much space. I've got loads of audio but again I've been clearing out the samples & sounds I don't use.
 
I got my SATA drive from OC (Very fast delivery). I'm going to install it tomorrow. My plan is to keep the 40GB IDE for a bit with XP installed. I'll run the SATA for a while just for storage.

But later I'll want to install XP on the SATA & keep the IDE for storage/Back up. How will I set this up (any thing I need to change in the BIOS for example)? And what's the procedure? I'm guessing use my XP disk to format the C drive (my IDE) & then hopefully I'll be prompted to install XP on one of my 2 HD's. From here I just choose the SATA drive. Is that about it or is there more to it?


Thanks for everyone's help & advice on here so far BTW. So glad I've got a place I can get this kind of info. Very helpful so thanks for that.
 
Good advice rpstewart. Makes sense. I'll get the SATA drive up & running. Then I'll disconnect the IDE when I'm ready to install XP on the SATA. Hopefully then all I should need to do is set boot priority to CD in the BIOS & install XP on the only available HD, My new SATA drive. Sorted ;)
 
I've installed my new SATA HD. I booted up XP & it it found the drive straight away & I can see it in the 'safely remove hardware' list. But it doesn't show up in the Hard Drive area of 'my computer' (see image below)

driveszh2.jpg


Do I need a driver for this or do I need to change something in the BIOS?
 
Cool that did the trick. Thanks for the advice ;)

One thing that concerned me a little though - Once the quick format had finshed I cloded down the disk management tool at which point XP crashed & I was greeted with the blue screen of death!! I rebooted & everything came back okay & I can now see the drive okay. It's still showing up in the 'safely remove hardware' list though. Is that normal?

Once more thing. Can you please tell me how I re-assign drive letters? At the moment my SATA Drive is drive F: ..... actually is is necessary to do this or can I just leave it as F:?
 
Cool. Thanks again for everyones help. No more blue screens of death so far & I've been copying files onto the new drive. I reckon I'll just leave it ticking away for a couple of weeks then I'll install XP onto it & just use the IDE as storage.
 
rpstewart said:
Don't format the IDE drive until you've got XP working properly on the SATA one, that way if it all goes pear shaped you've got a working install to go back to. The best option is to physically disconnect the IDE drive while you go through the XP setup, it's then safe and XP won't decide to put the boot files on it and the rest on the SATA drive as it sometimes has a tendency to do.
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One more thing about this before I give it a go - If all goes well & XP installs on the SATA drive without a hitch will I then be able to re-connect the IDE drive & see the files on there so I can move them to the SATA? I wasn't sure if having XP installed on the IDE might confuse things when I re-connected it.

If not then that's cool because once I've moved all my files to the SATA I can then format the IDE drive (getting rid of XP & all the program files that will be on there) & just use it for storage/Back up.
 
Well here I am on the other side. Everything seemed to go okay. Thanks for everyone's advice. I've now got the SATA as my main drive with XP installed onto it. I re-connected the old IDE, formatted this & now I'm going to use that as a storage/back/up drive.


One thing though - I can still see my SATA drive in the 'safely remove hardware' list! It wasn't there at first. But then I installed some mobo drivers (NVIDIA GART, NVIDIA SMbus, NVIDIA Ethernet & NVIDIA IDE) & it appeared once I'd restarted XP. I don't understand why it shows up here. Why on Earth would I want to safely remove my C: drive?! Anyway could it be something to do with the drivers I installed? How can I stop this showing up in 'safely remove hardware'?
 
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