Setting up 2nd hard drive in bios

parazaine

parazaine

parazaine

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16 Nov 2010
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I recently purchased a nice I7 950 system with an 80 gig ssd drive which came installed with the 2nd drive (a 1 tb drive) also apparently installed.

Checking in the bios (the 1 tb drive is not even showing in mylist of peripherals) I see that it is disabled but enabling it causes a boot error.

What do I need to do to enable it? I'm fairly tech ignorant...it seems to want to set it up as a raid configuration (no idea what this means though and there are a bewildering number of configuration option in the bios)

There seemsto be some sort of 100mb boot partition on the 1 tb drive which i assume is a remnant of it being the primary boot device before installing the ssd drive.

Any help in how to resolve this would be appreciated as I have already used about 60% of the ssd storage for my main software but I need to install at least 2 games that are very large for beta-testing purposes....Rise of Flight and Lord of the Rings Online that i do some casual open-beta testing for not to mention all my other software (i produce my own music using reason 5.0 and currently have had to leave all of this very memory intensive stuff on my old computer).

I thought the 2 disk drives had to be the same type for a raid set-up?
 
When you enable the second drive check the boot settings , your bios might be picking the second drive first for booting up , Change it to the ssd.
windows puts it's own 100mb partition on the boot drive , so there is nothing wrong there.
 
I tried enabling the 1 tb drive in the bios and on booting the computer it crashed my whole system and it took me quite a while and a full system restore to get it working again.

I hadn't checked the boot disk so i'm not sure if the ssd was highlighted but i'm reluctant to try it again after the results of my last attempt.

Could someone explain, in simple term, what i need to do? Is it as simple as enabling the 1 tb drive in the bios and then going into the boot menu and ensuring the ssd drive is highlighted as the boot drive?

Does the original 1 tb drive come formatted and ready for use? This would have been a lot easier if someone at overclockers had just configured both drives instead of just putting in the ssd.

Both drives are physically connected and presumably ready to go....no problems with the ssd.

As i said, i'm reluctant to try enabling the 2nd drive in the bios as i've crashed the computer twice trying to make it accessable.

if someone can confirm that all i need to do is enable it and then go into the boot menu and make sure the ssd is set as the boot drive then i will attempt it again.

thank you for your patience, as you can see, i have only a rudimentary knowledge of computing and bios etc


OK, tried it again....went into bios, enabled the 2nd drive then went into the boot menu and prioritised the ssd drive as the boot drive. Crashed my system again and had to do a full recovery to get it back again...pulling my hair out here!

Note: my comment about the 100mb boot partition is that there's one on the 1 tb drive..is that what is causing my problems? Even with the ssd selected as the first boot device, something is causing the boot to fail and right at the last moment...i get the windows 7 logo swirling then the screen freezes and i get a blue-screen error message which appers and disappears too fast to read. My only option has been to restore and i've had to do it 3 times now.

Why wasn't the computer configured correctly? I paid enough for it. Surely it would take someone that knows what they are doing seconds to set up the 2nd drive...seems abit lazy to me that it wasn't done.

I've just realised that the second drive is recognised in the device manager but doesn't show up in 'my computer' Could it already be correctly configured/installed? just not visible?
 
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As previously stated, i recently bought a new system and an ssd upgrade.

The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R

The SSD came preinstalled as did the 'original' 1TB drive.

I'm using the SSD as the boot drive but whilst both drives are recognised by the device manager and both 'device operating normally' the 1tb drive is not listed when i go to 'my computer'.

Both drives are SATAII but all my attempts to configure the 1tb drive have failed, resulting in an unbootable system.

I have checked that the ssd is first in the boot priority list and it is followed by cd rom then the 2nd drive last.

The SSD boot drive is connected via IDE channel 1 and the 1tb drive IDE0.

Some of the forums I have read have suggested that the boot drive should be on IDE channel 0.

Any help would be appreciated as i'm clueless what the problem is..probably the bios settings but i'm not sure what to change them to to make the second drive accessable.
 
oops - forgot to add that have you installed all the motherboard drivers from the install CD ?

If you haven't and you enable AHCI mode in the BIOS on one of the HDD controllers it will cause windows to crash on booting, that sounds like what you are experiencing? If so, to get windows to load correctly you need to enable the controller but select IDE mode instead of AHCI - this will disable NCQ and slow access to the drive slightly, but if you are experiencing this problem I think its the only way to get windows loading so that you can install a driver and then apply the registry tweak to enable the AHCI driver - google it if this sounds like what your problem might be :)
 
The 1tb drive seems to have a 100m boot partition so i think its been formatted - hard to tell when it isnt showing up.

I can confirm that AHCI is not installed but i've tried setting the 2nd disk up using IDE and it's still a no-go.

I installed everything that was on the motherboard CD ..there wasn't any AHCI to install.

When booting, i get the message that AHCI isn't installed but i thought this wasnt a problem if i set it up using IDE.

There's a RAID bios installed but I havent the first clue how (or even if) to install raid. Is it even possible with an SSD and a 1TB drive?...they are both SATAII as far as I know.

There were detailed instructions on how to set up two identical drives in the RAID bios but nothing about setting up 2 dissimilar drives so i assumed it wasn't possible.

I have tried enabling XHD (not entirely sure thats the 2nd drive and if it isn't then im not sure how to enable it) and setting it to IDE control..unfortunately it seems to default to RAID which might be the problem as RAID isnt configured. Thanks for your reply, hopefully I can figure out what the problem is...it's a bit like trying to solve a quadratic equation with only a rudimentary knowledge of mathematics for me lol.

I can boot windows using the SSD, it just crashes when the 2nd drive (or xhd whatever that is) is enabled so I can get to windows to 'tweak' the registry....I will google what you suggest when I have the time.

Just a further question..if the 2nd drive isnt formatted/partitioned, do i have to do that from Command Prompt...as it doesn't show up and there doesn't seem to be a way of doing it from windows that I can find.
 
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Well I just googled 'ahci not installed' and found out the exremely annoying information that follows when following a link about setting up raid in intel motherboards.

It seems that if a second drive is enabled as raid (which apparently enables AHCI as well) after the operating system has been installed then on booting the system you get the blue screen error i couldnt read and the system becomes unbootable.

Nice of Overclockers not only not to configure the second drive but also to make it impossible to configure with this motherboard.

Does anyone have any way round this? I'm almost at the point of taking the damned SSD out and reinstalling everything using the 1 tb drive. I guess they just thought i'd be content to use the 80 gig SSD? Of course I want to use the other drive as well!

I reasonably expected not to have to have a degree in computing just to use my new purchase correctly.

Having checked the system, it hasn't even been overclocked. Were they having a bad day with my order? or were they just being ultra lazy?
 
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Open Explorer, right click Computer select Manage goto disk management and
see if your 1tb drive is online otherwise right click and enable.
 
Thank you Ataro.....its amazing what you can do with a little knowledge.

The second partition (931 gb) wasnt formatted or configured and i was able to do both and assign it a drive designation (while leaving the system partition alone).

I am stunned that it was something so simple and yet it wasn't done before sending me my computer...I guess they assume their customers are all tech savvy.

Can't thank you enough....i'm good to go finally.
 
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