Adding 1 SATA data drive to existing system???

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I've been searching and searching and cannot find a straight answer to
this question but there are a lot of different comments about it.

My current setup is an A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard with 2 PATA disks on
the primary IDE controller and 2 CD/DVD drives on the secondary IDE
controller. The master PATA drive is partitioned into C (Fat32) and E
(NTFS) and contains Win98SE and Win2000 dual boot. The slave PATA
drive is a single NTFS partition D. The CD/DVDs are drives F and G.

I need more hard drive space and want to add a SATA drive since I have
the capability. I only want to use it for extra space, not to boot
from it or to use in a RAID configuration. Just for extra NTFS
formatted space..

What do I need to do? Just plug it in? Do I need to load any special
drivers? I plan to format it as one NTFS partition. How will the
BIOS detect it? As a boot drive or an extra drive? How will Win2000
detect it, as drive H?

I just don't want the BIOS to get confused or to screw up my current
dual boot settings or my existing PATA drive assignments.

Thanks for any suggestions.
 
From your Mobo CD install the SATA drivers
then just plug your Sata drive in.
When you are in XP go to Control Panel/administrative tools/computer
management/disk management
the drive should be listed there.........you will need to format it in order to
use it.
peter
 
Okay, I have Win2000, but I know about the disk management tool. So
are you sure the BIOS isn't going to see the drive as a boot drive?
 
I read your manual.........if you have the proper drive set up as 1st boot
device you should be fine.
peter
 
Hello [email protected]!

You wrote that you're using Win98 as one of the OS in your system.
You should take into consideration that the SATA disks appear
as SCSI disks to your OS - and this means that those new disks
will be pushed to the front. The former "D", "E", "F" and so on
will slip behind the partitions of the new SATA disks.
Not bad as long as you don't have software pieces that rely on the
drive letters. In my system I experienced trouble since the
Adobe Album software didn't find my photos any longer after the
SATA installation :(.
The Win2000 and all the newer Wins should be able to assign any letters.

Hth
Michael
 
Well it's a non-issue for the Win98SE installation anyway since I
formatted the entire SATA drive as NTFS.

I purchased and installed the drive over the weekend and it went
trouble free. Thanks to everyone that responded. In case anyone is
interested, all I needed to do was shutdown and enable the SATA
controller on the MB, reboot and install the Sil driver for Win2k,
shutdown again and install the HD, then boot up into Win2k and go to
the disk manager to "initialize" and format it NTFS. The thing that
took the longest was formatting the drive. Everything else was quick
and pain free. I'm not sure why a lot of people have problems with
SATA and PATA drive mixtures.
 
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