Adding SATA drive on A8N-SLI

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jess
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J

Jess

Hello:

I recently built a new system with an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard
and Windows XP-Pro (not Win-64). I initially used two old ATA 160-GB
hard drives (both WDC WD 1600JB). That has served me well for over a month.

I just purchased a Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS - hard drive -
250 GB - SATA II. The hardware installation went fine. I have it
connected to the SATA1 motherboard connector. My goal is to make two
partitions on the physical drive with a boot partition and a 200-GB data
partition.

I do not intent to have any kind of RAID configuration right now.

However, when I boot I see the two existing old ATA drives (and my two
CD/DVD drives as well) but it shows NO drives on First SATA Master (or
on 2,3, or 4 for that matter). That strikes me as strange. Am I missing
something? I do have all four SATA ports "enabled" in the BIOS.

But if I use the SiImage SCSI/Raid boot menu, I can "see" the physical
SATA drive. I used that to configured it as a SiL JBOD drive (whatever
that means - sorry, I am new to RAID).

I then used Acronis Disk Director in Windows (the bootable CD hung up)
to clone the old ATA boot drive (C:) to a 50-GB partition on the newly
visible SiL JBOD drive. I left the other 200-GB unassigned for now. I
then made the new SATA drive visible in XP by assigning Drive Letter J:.
It appears to have all the data from the old boot drive.

If I then go into the BIOS boot sequence and make the SCSI-0 SiI JBOD
drive first in the hard drive boot sequence, the system appears to boot
OK. But it really is not. It goes through log-in (I have "autologin" via
TweakUI) and appears to be "ready to go." But nothing much works. I
cannot right click "My Computer" and check properties (it does nothing)
and if I go through the Start Menu, and click "All Programs," it just
hags there with a blank box with no programs showing. I can "run" "cmd"
and running "set" shows my boot and Windows drive is I:, so I gather I
am getting the new drive to boot.

The Western Digital manual says it should have a jumper on pins 1-2 from
the factory but there was no jumper in the box. I got a "bare drive,"
not a kit. But from the manual, it "appears" that having 1-2 jumped is
just a place to "store" the jumper, so the presence or absence of a
jumper may not matter.

Should I "undo" the RAID setup? But shouldn't the boot up see it as SATA
1 Master on boot up independently of how I have the RAID set up?

Should I used the NVRAID setup instead?

I am stuck here. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Jess
 
On a lark, I disabled in the BIOS IDE Controller 0 which effectively
removed both "old" hard drives. The two optical drives are on IDE
Controller 1.

The system now boots to the point of getting the Windows Product
reactivation screen (admittedly what it sees at this point is pretty
different with both original hard drives "gone" and a new SATA hard
drive). But, whether I answer "Yes" or "No" to the "Windows must be
reactivated within 3 days" dialog box, in 3-4 seconds the "Windows
Product Activation" dialog box reappears. Only a forced reboot gets me
out of this "infinite loop."

Maybe this helps. Maybe it is progress?

BTW: I do *NOT* have a floppy disk drive

I may try a scratch reinstall of XP in this mode, but that is a whole
day's work with all the software I am running, so I'll likely wait for
more ideas.

Thanks for your ideas...
 
A thought... Could you have two drives with active primary partitions
after your cloning? If so, temporarily, try removing the old IDE drive,
that is the old drive that had the original active primary partition and
see if things straighten out.

Good luck,

Steven
 
If you go into Local Disk Management, is your SATA partition there? If so,
you probably have to create the partitions there and do it from there.
Otherwise when you reinstall Windows you can use the Windows partitoning
tool that prompts you where you want to install Windows onto.
 
Hi All:

Thanks for all the suggestions. As I looked at the time I have spent
trying to get this to work with no assurance I would have a stable
system, I decided to do a clean reinstall of Windows XP. I first
disabled both old IDE PATA hard drives and left only the two optical
drives plus the new SATA drive. I had to hunt down the SATA drivers to
get the XP install to "see" my SATA drive and use the F6 install option,
but once I got past that, the install was flawless including an
effortless "re-activation" with Microsoft (a point where I always hold
my breath).

Now I have a clean system with XP installed on Drive C: which always
seems better. I have reactivated the old IDE drives and moved my old
PATA IDE data over to a data partition on the new SATA hard drive. They
will now hold static files and inactive video stuff plus my Acronis True
Image Backups.

I am more than happy with this system.

Thanks for all the help.

Jess
 
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