SATA drive as slave?

silverside

How do you set up a SATA drive to be a slave to an IDE drive?

Running a Biostar 200N Nforce2 SFF system with latest bios.
My original setup was a 200n with a samsung spinpoint 160GB HD, formatted as NTFS, booting into XP Pro.

All was fine for several weeks until I installed some dodgy drivers which made my XP installation unbootable, even in safe mode.

So I put in an IDE HD and installed XP on that. That works fine when the SATA drive is disconnected. However whenever the SATA drive is connected, it takes over midway through a boot, leading to repeated reboots. I have set up the boot sequence to be 'HDD 0' only. I do not see anything in the BIOS to set the SATA drive as slaves.

If I disconnect the SATA drive while booting and plug it in later, XP boots ok, can see the SATA drive from a dos prompt (i.e. dir works, but not 'cd' change directory, or access any files).

This is driving me crazy as I have files on the SATA drive I need to access. Any help gratefully recieved.

Creamy Goodness

is there any settings in the bios to change boot-disk prioroty(sp) that way you can set the XP hard drive to boot first and the sata boot as a slave drive

silverside

Yes, and I think I am setting it up correctly. Boot sequence is HDD0 only,and 'Boot other devices' is off. If I wanted to boot from the SATA drive, I would set it up to boot from 'SCSI'.

It does actually boot from the IDE drive. But the SATA drive seems to kick in a few seconds later.

Maybe this question is very specific to my bios/motherboard, and I should ask this in a specific forum for them. But in general, do you have to do anything special to make SATA drives "non-master"?

KdjaCL

The SATA bios is loaded after the mobo bios so would kick in then.
May be an option in the SATA Bios to make it not boot but may be once its enabled its enabled as 1st disc ie 0

Thats a good Q let us know how you get on.

kdjac

silverside

"That's a good question" is not exactly the reply I wanted to hear

ah well...

do you think it would work any differently if I plugged it in to another motherboard?

I have had so many niggles with this SFF system that I am tempted to give up on it and build a normal desktop.

KdjaCL

Why aint you using the SATA as a boot ,they really fast.

Unless BIOS in SATS Land allows it to be not 1st cant see a way around it.
Unless you dont put an OS on it? Then it will have to boot off next device.


kdjac

joePC

There is no Primary / slave settings for SATA, connect the sata drive into (sata connector 2)

Boot from Hdd, this should work.

Does the sata drive have an old OS on it, this could be causing it to boot instead of Hdd,

Thanks JoePC

silverside

Just to recap:

The SATA drive has a XP bootable installation on it. However some of the drivers seem to be stopping the XP drive booting, even in safe mode.

I have tried reinstalling Windows onto the XP SATA drive, but the SATA raid drivers arent working in the Windows Setup (using the 'Press F6 now to install RAID drivers'). Possibly this is because my floppy drive or discs are dodgy - that will be my next line of attack.

I want to fix up the OS on the SATA drive *from* the OS on the IDE drive. However the SATA drive hijacks the boot sequence even when I tell it not to.

Mac daddy

If it is samsung check this out

Mac daddy

I have a spin point 120 Gig in raid 0 the pc and there is a jumper on the back of the drive were you select master/slave

silverside

useful info - will check it out.

airetam_storm

if the drivers arnt loading after f6 make sure the sata cable is in firmly cause they hav a nasty habit of commin lose

otherwise just unplug all sata and drives wit data on dem and only put in a blank ide and start from very scratch

silverside

Another update:

I have started from very scratch. I have a fresh installation of XP on an IDE drive. However it won't boot up properly while the SATA drive is connected, and hot-plugging the SATA cable doesnt seem to work. Unplugging SATA means my computer works just fine.

The sata drive itself seems to be working fine. Booting in safe mode gives a list of drivers up until the time it halts.

Then I put a dual boot of mandrake/winxp on the IDE drive. Mandrake boots up fine with SATA connected. It sees the SATA physical drive but I havent figured out how to view the contents yet. I probably wont be able to edit any data on SATA because it's formatted as NTFS.

Trying to do a recovery installation of WinXP onto SATA by booting from CD and installing the drivers from XP doesnt work. XP has big problems reading any floppies I give it. Occassionally they work, but never well enough for the drivers to work. I have tried both the latest via drivers from VIA website, and the ones from my motherboard supplier. I am using a cheap floppy drive and floppy data cable so have ordered replacements to see if they work. The only floppy disks I can get at the moment are no-name brands so I will try to get Verbatim or similar to narrow it down even more.

At this stage, I only want to get some data off my SATA drive - my old emails etc. I know what they say about having backups - I have all my project work safe.