New sata

Fabritzo

Do I have to boot from sata if I want to run 2 ide hds off the same mobo? If not how to I run the sata as slave?

Inspector Gadget

Eh, most motherboards have two PATA (Parallel ATA, aka what came before SATA) connectors, which will support four devices - be that hard disks, CD/DVD-ROMs, MO drives (e.g. Zip) or whatever - so unless you've got three of those devices you should be able to put a second hard disk on one of your channels (each channel - i.e. motherboard socket - can accept two devices, a "master" and a "slave" - on a shared cable).

SATA, on the other hand, is "point-to-point", which means it has no master/slave stuff, and one cable per disk. Two SATA ports = two drives, and so on.

Does this help?
Gadget

Fabritzo

There's a dvd drive, a cd drive, 2 ide hds and a sata hd

Inspector Gadget

Eh, you should be able to boot off a PATA drive no problem; though you may want to have a good look at your BIOS settings because of the (likely) presence of two mass storage controllers (the PATA controller and the SATA controller, as they're both in use simultaneously). Check out the boot order in particular, see what options it offers, and use your best judgement.

Gadget

Fabritzo

Still haven't got xp to show this wd sata as additional storage when booting from ide. It shows in device manager though "This device is working properly" It doesn't show up when I click into my computer tho.

stevenmu

You'll probably need to partition and format it. I don't have xp here but roughly from memory:

Go to "control panel", then "administrative tools" and open "computer management". One of the things on the left should be for "Disk Management" or somthing like that. When you select that the right side will show the disks in your system and what partitions are on them. On of them should be your SATA drive, right click on that and select "Create primary partition", I think when it's done it'll prompt you to format it, if not right-click on it again and you should be able to. It'll give you the choice of either NTFS or FAT32, personally I always go for FAT32 but most people would say NTFS which is more secure and possibly a bit faster these days. If at any stage it gives you the option of making the partition active, don't do it. Making a partition active means the system will use that to try and boot, it doesn't refer to it being usable.

Hope that helps

Fabritzo

Thanks, that got it sorted, I then found out that one can use diskmgmt.msc from run command. It's took at least a hal hour to format but it's done now and I've got the 2 ides showing up with it.

vibe666

i have a similar setup to you, and mines working fine too. there should be a setting in the bios to favour either PATA/IDE or SATA as the first boot device which you'll be able to change if you decide to boot off the SATA drive or get another one and stick windows on that (no reason why you should at this stage though, not any real difference in speed).