Seasons greetings to the members of this group.
I am new to the workings of SATA, I have not taken a lot of notice of
it as I have been happy using the old ATA setup, but my P4C800 Deluxe
is getting old and I currently have 2 IDE hard drives on the first IDE
port and a DVD burner and a CD-ROM drive on the second IDE port.
I am slowly buying components to build a new computer, I wanted to buy
a SATA DVD burner and replace both of the existing DVD and CD drives.
I currently have a new Motherboard, CPU, Heatsink Fan and DDR2 ram,
waiting on Hard Drives, Video Card and Power Supply.
Is it possible to leave my 2 ATA IDE hard drives as they are for the
moment and plug the new SATA DVD burner into one of the SATA ports on
the old P4C800 board?
Grateful for any assistance.
Keith
Thanks to those who replied with helpful advise, I have assembled my
new system, like my old system, this one will have to last me a few
years, I am not a gamer so that wont be a problem. This motherboard
gives me a lot of processor possibilities, I will keep my eyes open on
eBay and pick up another nice deal.
I still have a spare SATA port, but I have no plans of using it
anytime soon, My previous system only had 120gb total drive space, my
new system has 2x 160gb drives plus an external Maxtor 160gb drive for
data backup.
There was one thing that gave me a problem and I manage to fix it
without knowing what I did, Windows XP Pro did not see my second hard
drive, It had the 1st 160gb drive as C: then my DVD burner as D:, I
went into 'Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management,
Disk Management' and changed the DVD burner from D: to E: to leave
room for the second 160gb hard drive.
I went into the help screen to find out how to get the second drive
back, I did a re scan and didn't see any drive but then the driver
disk in the burner went off, so I reinstalled the drivers after that I
don't know what I did, I remember finding the second drive there but
it was not configured or something.
I tried to get it to format and nothing I did appeared to work so I
went into Windows Explorer and the drive was there so I right clicked
and chose to format D: then a Windows popup told me that the drive was
in use and I had to stop any processes before continuing, I scratched
my head and tried again, and again the popup told me to stop any
processes on D: before continuing, I went back to the Disk Management
and found that Windows was Formatting D: drive, I don't know what I
did but it all works well...
Does any body know the correct process to get the second drive up and
running without all the stuffing around I did, Just in case I need to
do a format and re-installation of windows in the future.
Cheers
Keith
My new system
Antec Solutions series SLK3700AMD Super Mid Tower (Reused)
Antec Earthwatts 500watt Power Supply (EA-500)
Enermax 120mm Variable Speed case fan (Intake) (Reused)
Enermax 120mm Variable Speed case fan (Exhaust) (Reused)
ABIT Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI (Motherboard)
Intel P4 3.40Gb/800/1M/Hyper-Threading
DEEPCOOL Winner D930 (CPU Fan)
CORSAIR TWIN2X1024-6400C4 (CM2X1024-6400C4)(4-4-4-12)
ASUS EN8500GT SILENT-HTP-512M (GeForce 8500GT 512mb)
5 Port High Speed USB 2.0 PCI Card (Reused)
SAMSUNG 160gb SATA-2 8meg Cache 7200rpm Model SP161HJ C:
SAMSUNG 160gb SATA-2 8meg Cache 7200rpm Model SP161HJ D:
ASUS DRW-1814BLT-SATA DVD(±R/±RW/±R DL) Cd(±R/±RW)
Panasonic 1.44mb (Reused)