SATA and UltraATA and ATA-I am CONFUSED!??? Help Please

  • Thread starter Thread starter jimc52
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jimc52

Hello everyone. I am doing an intermediate upgrade right now by going
from a 754 pin to 939 pin AMD Athlon 3800 64 Processor + new
motherboard. I know its just a single processor!

Anyway, I purchased a really HOT motherboard, an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe
MB. I decided to stick with my two 1 Gig DDR 333 memory modules for
now (I didn’t want to spend $300+ more for DDR2...thus I am not going
dual core yet).

Anyway, this Asus mb has IDE 40-1 pin PRI_IDE and SEC-IDE connectors.
The motherboard manual says (and I am a little confused about the
color coding here and what its purpose is):

"These connectors are for Ultra ATA 133/100/66 signal cables. The
Ultra ATA 133/100/66 signal cable has three connectors: a blue
connector for the primary IDE connector on the motherboard, a black
connector for an Ultra ATA 133/100/66 IDE slave device (optical
drive/hard disk drive), and a gray onnector for an Ultra ATA
133/100/66 IDE master device (hard disk drive). If you install two
hard disk drives, you must configure the second drive as a slave
device by setting its jumper accordingly. Refer to the hard disk or
optical drive documentation for the jumper settings."

Ok, so I have a NEW Maxtor 300 Gig ATA (not Ultra) 100 HD I have
been holding onto for a while I would like to use. I aso have a whole
slew of 7200 RPM ATA HD’s, mainly western digital from my current
computer setup.

My question is this...can I use my ATA drives on the Ultra ATA IDE’s?
I want to be able to set up:

Primary Master IDE and Slave IDE with HD’s
Secondary Master as IDE and Secondary Slave as DVD writeable drive

I am hoping someone here can tell me that the only difference between
Ultra ATA and ATA is just speed and I can use my older ATA drives
which are NOT "Ultra."

Normally, a windows clean install detects the primary IDE master as
the C drive and wants to install there. However, my mb also has four
SATA connectors and I would like to use it INSTEAD of the primary IDE
since I also have a new 500 GIG SATA drive. I know there are probs
with getting a SATA drive to be the primary bootable device. What
should I be looking for and doing to make the SATA1 drive my primary
for Windows installation? I want to do clean install of XP Pro for now
onto the SATA and then use my IDE drives for more disk space....that’s
the bottom line.

I hope I have made myself clear here. Please clarify for me if I can
do this so I don’t waste my time trying to install HD that will not be
detected.
 
jimc52 said:
Hello everyone. I am doing an intermediate upgrade right now by going
from a 754 pin to 939 pin AMD Athlon 3800 64 Processor + new
motherboard. I know its just a single processor!

Anyway, I purchased a really HOT motherboard, an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe
MB. I decided to stick with my two 1 Gig DDR 333 memory modules for
now (I didn’t want to spend $300+ more for DDR2...thus I am not going
dual core yet).

Anyway, this Asus mb has IDE 40-1 pin PRI_IDE and SEC-IDE connectors.
The motherboard manual says (and I am a little confused about the
color coding here and what its purpose is):

"These connectors are for Ultra ATA 133/100/66 signal cables. The
Ultra ATA 133/100/66 signal cable has three connectors: a blue
connector for the primary IDE connector on the motherboard, a black
connector for an Ultra ATA 133/100/66 IDE slave device (optical
drive/hard disk drive), and a gray onnector for an Ultra ATA
133/100/66 IDE master device (hard disk drive). If you install two
hard disk drives, you must configure the second drive as a slave
device by setting its jumper accordingly. Refer to the hard disk or
optical drive documentation for the jumper settings."

Ok, so I have a NEW Maxtor 300 Gig ATA (not Ultra) 100 HD I have
been holding onto for a while I would like to use. I aso have a whole
slew of 7200 RPM ATA HD’s, mainly western digital from my current
computer setup.

My question is this...can I use my ATA drives on the Ultra ATA IDE’s?
I want to be able to set up:

Primary Master IDE and Slave IDE with HD’s
Secondary Master as IDE and Secondary Slave as DVD writeable drive

I am hoping someone here can tell me that the only difference between
Ultra ATA and ATA is just speed and I can use my older ATA drives
which are NOT "Ultra."

Normally, a windows clean install detects the primary IDE master as
the C drive and wants to install there. However, my mb also has four
SATA connectors and I would like to use it INSTEAD of the primary IDE
since I also have a new 500 GIG SATA drive. I know there are probs
with getting a SATA drive to be the primary bootable device. What
should I be looking for and doing to make the SATA1 drive my primary
for Windows installation? I want to do clean install of XP Pro for now
onto the SATA and then use my IDE drives for more disk space....that’s
the bottom line.

I hope I have made myself clear here. Please clarify for me if I can
do this so I don’t waste my time trying to install HD that will not be
detected.
Click to expand...

IDE interfaces are backward compatible, so you need not worry about
the slight terminology differences. Connect up your IDE hard drives
and optical drive to the ribbon cables, as you normally would. By using
80 wire cables, you'll get the fastest transfer rates each drive can
offer. (The 80 wire cables, make 40 of the wires as grounds, which
improves the signal quality on the cable. And driver software can
actually detect the kind of cable being used - I read that in the
ATAPI standard.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_ATA

With respect to your SATA question, I'd connect just the SATA drive at
first, and whatever optical drive you've got that is suitable for
installing from the Windows CD. That is my method to make sure the
Windows install doesn't mess with anything else. Once everything looks
good, shut down and finish connecting and configuring the rest of the
IDE stuff.

With some BIOS designs, *every* time you change the number and
configuration of the disks, the BIOS forgets the boot order. You
have to go back into the BIOS and set up the boot order again.
So in the two step process above, you'll be visiting the BIOS
to correct the boot order, once you add the remainder of your
IDE disks.

Paul
 
Paul explained the connections I jus wanted to say that the A8N32 can handle
an Athlon 64x2 wich is a dual core processor but a Socket 939 mobo does not
use DDR2 Ram.
During the XP installation dont forget to push F6 to load the SATA drivers
which you will need to copy from the Mobo CD to a floppy.
peter
 
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