A7N8X Dlx SATA - Almost There!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Luxana
  • Start date Start date
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Luxana

I just installed one SATA drive. I'm still booting off my IDE drive,
and want to stay that way.

The drive shows up in the BIOS on bootup, it shows up in the device
manager in Windows XP. I have the most recent RAID driver.

BUT, the drive doesn't show up in Windows Explorer. I don't know how I
can format, and start using it. (just for data, not for boot-up)

Here are my quesitons:

1) How can I format this drive and start using it?

2) If later on I want to change my mind, and boot from the SATA drive,
can I make that switch? Possibly Ghost my system onto it?

A7N8X Deluxe
Athlon XP 2200
Windows XP SP1
1GB RAM
2 IDE Hard Drives, 1 SATA Drive, 1 CD-ROM

Thanks!

Lux
 
Luxana said:
I just installed one SATA drive. I'm still booting off my IDE drive,
and want to stay that way.

The drive shows up in the BIOS on bootup, it shows up in the device
manager in Windows XP. I have the most recent RAID driver.

BUT, the drive doesn't show up in Windows Explorer. I don't know how I
can format, and start using it. (just for data, not for boot-up)

Here are my quesitons:

1) How can I format this drive and start using it?
Click to expand...

You need to partition it with fdisk or similar.
2) If later on I want to change my mind, and boot from the SATA drive,
can I make that switch? Possibly Ghost my system onto it?
Click to expand...

I think Ghost is the most satisfactory solution as the drive letters work
nicely. You simply image the drive and stick it on the SATA, then go into
BIOS and make booting from SCSI device before IDE.

Ben
 
The drive shows up in the BIOS on bootup, it shows up in the device
manager in Windows XP. I have the most recent RAID driver.

BUT, the drive doesn't show up in Windows Explorer. I don't know how I
can format, and start using it. (just for data, not for boot-up)
Click to expand...

I'm guessing the drive has never been partitioned/formatted.

Right Click My Computer Icon
(if you don't have it on your desktop, go to start->right click my
computer entry, show on desktop)
Select Manage
Click the option for Disk Management on the left hand side.
You should see two frames on the right..top tells what drives are
partitioned.
Bottom shows current segments partitioned, and not partitioned.

To make one big Hard Drive partition:
Right click the 'bar' representing the unpartitioned space.

Here, you can Format first...It will automatically assign a drive
letter when it is done.
There will be a few entries here..You will probably want to assign
it as a NTFS drive (not FAT OR FAT32)..Other than that the menus
are easy.

Thanks,
jody
 
Jody said:
I'm guessing the drive has never been partitioned/formatted.

Right Click My Computer Icon
(if you don't have it on your desktop, go to start->right click my
computer entry, show on desktop)
Select Manage
Click the option for Disk Management on the left hand side.
You should see two frames on the right..top tells what drives are
partitioned.
Bottom shows current segments partitioned, and not partitioned.

To make one big Hard Drive partition:
Right click the 'bar' representing the unpartitioned space.

Here, you can Format first...It will automatically assign a drive
letter when it is done.
There will be a few entries here..You will probably want to assign
it as a NTFS drive (not FAT OR FAT32)..Other than that the menus
are easy.

Thanks,
jody
Click to expand...
Besides all the things said before, I can advice you to boot from the SATA
drive (depending on the quality of the HDD). I'm having this drive in
combination with a WD Raptor and it's really fast.
Don't forget to change the first bootdevice (BIOS) in SCSI when you want to
boot from SATA.

Lane
 
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