New SATA drive

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?
 
You need to create and format a partition on the disk before it will be available for use.

Right click on My Computer and pick Manage, in the new window pick Disk Management from the left hand menu, the snap-in will open on the right. Locate your new disk in the right hand pane (it'll show as unallocated), right click in the space and pick New Partition, give it a label if you want, check the Quick Format box and hit OK. It takes about 20s to do a quick format after which Windows will give it a drive letter (you can change them around if it ends up after your DVD or anything else).

It should now be available in My Computer / Explorer.
 
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.
 
wonder if I can just ask a question in this thread

I have 2 existing 80gig ide drives

have just purchased a 320 gig sata drive..mobo and PSU has all the conectors I need

I take it I can just add the sata drive as an additional drive and the pc will continue to boot from the c:\ partition?

is there any real world speed increase by switching the boot drive to be the SATA drive..a few seconds here or there makes no difference to me...I really only bought to increase my storage of music
 
FTM said:
I take it I can just add the sata drive as an additional drive and the pc will continue to boot from the c:\ partition?
Click to expand...
Yeah, if you follow the steps noted in this thread you should be fine, just make sure that the SATA drive doesn't upset the existing boot order in the BIOS - a quick check once it's installed is all it needs.

FTM said:
is there any real world speed increase by switching the boot drive to be the SATA drive..a few seconds here or there makes no difference to me...I really only bought to increase my storage of music
Click to expand...
Any new SATA drive purchased now will be quicker than an older 80Gb IDE drive, not because of the interface but simply because the underlying disk technology has improved. Each new generation of drive packs more data onto the platters which improves speeds.

Whether this is noticable or not is debatable. Reinstalling from scratch is a real pain so rather than going that far it might be worthwhile moving your Windows swap file onto the SATA disk. This should make task swapping a bit faster and therefore make the PC feel a bit more responsive when heavily loaded.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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'?
 
SATA is a hot swappable protocol so the drive will appear in the "Safely Remove Hardware" list. You won't be able to stop the C: drive because there will always be open files that will prevent the stop.

As far as I'm aware there's no way of removing it from the list.
 
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