SATA on P4P800- XP Pro

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Chief

I'm switching from an IDE hard drive to SATA, before I get myself in trouble
does anyone run a similar config that I have and have any advice?
Will the P4P800 with the latest bios immediately recognize the new HDD and
basically be a plug and pray operation? Or do I need to do any prepping
beforehand?

tia
 
"Chief" said:
I'm switching from an IDE hard drive to SATA, before I get myself in trouble
does anyone run a similar config that I have and have any advice?
Will the P4P800 with the latest bios immediately recognize the new HDD and
basically be a plug and pray operation? Or do I need to do any prepping
beforehand?

tia
Click to expand...

There are two ways to use SATA on the Southbridge. In RAID mode, or
in non-RAID mode. RAID mode requires that your board have an ICH5R
Southbridge, whereas non-RAID mode can use either ICH5 or ICH5R.

You have to select the mode of operation in the BIOS.

I'll assume you want a single drive, non-RAID configuration.

There is room for six disks on the Southbridge. Four PATA and two
SATA. If you are using an older OS, like Win98SE, you can only
select the use of four of six. The reason being, that Win98SE
only understands four PATA drives, and by using the BIOS setting
"Compatible", you can make the two SATA interfaces on the Southbridge
take the place of two PATA drives on one IDE cable. This causes
that PATA IDE connector to be disabled. So, two PATA plus two SATA
is an option, and the OS is fooled into thinking the SATA
drives are in fact PATA.

If you have a more modern OS, like Win2K or WinXP, then all
six drives can be used. Select "Enhanced" and set the operating
mode to [S-ATA] in all cases, as that is the only mode that works
right. You select [S-ATA] in Enhanced mode, even if you don't have
a SATA drive connected at that moment.

For non-RAID, I think the drive can be seen without installing a
driver via F6 during install.

If using RAID (WinXP only?), you'll want RAID mode selected in the
BIOS before you start, and then have a copy of the Intel IAAR
(RAID driver) on a floppy, to be installed by pressing F6.
Consult the manual, to find the key combo that allows you to
enter the RAID BIOS, to set up any SATA RAID arrays that you have.
If striping RAID disks, don't install the OS on them, due to the
mess that is caused if one of the two disks fails. You'd have a lot
of trouble recovering from a failure. Mirror mode is OK for a boot
disk, but in any case, experiment with the RAID array, and how to
do maintenance on it (i.e. disconnect a mirror drive, to simulate
a failure, then rebuild the array, after reconnecting the drive,
so you know how to do it - don't use live data until you are
comfortable that you know how to use it).

There aren't too many scenarios that justify these simple RAID
setups. Striped arrays increase bandwidth, but the only time it
would get used, is copying large sets of files. Even a lot of
video editing now, uses compressed formats, so high bandwidth
is not needed. Even capturing video from a DV camera via Firewire,
can be handled more smoothly (no frame drop) via a single disk.
A striped array might make a good Photoshop scratch disk, and if
you regularly use tools that prefer an "input" disk and an
"output disk", two striped arrays, one on the Southbridge and
one on the Promise/Via/Sis RAID chip, is possibly a good way
to work. But for most ordinary tasks, RAID is just a maintenance
headache (more trouble than it is worth). You still need good
backups of your data, no matter whether you use RAID or not
(i.e. say the power supply fries all the disks, by overvolting
+12V).

HTH,
Paul
 
depends on what your current IDE drive is doing. If it is C: and your
boot/system disk then you may have a lot of work in front of you.
I recently bought a seagate 160mb drive to put on a A7V600 MB. The system is
running with a QUantum Fireball XA as C: on the primary IDE channel. i have
two other drives, one as a slave and the other as primary on the second IDE
channel. I started about 10 days ago to install it. My IDE C: drive is the
system boot drive, has the system on it and most of my software. I run XP
pro and have it up to the latest patch. MY objective was to just swap
drives and use the SATA drive for boot system, software etc.
Seagate has a downloadable install program for their drives. I downloaded
it (10mb) and ran it with the new SATA drive attached and turned on
(incidentally you will need a power plug adaptor probably besides the SATA
cable). I partitioned (2 80 mb partitions NTFS) and formatted the SATA drive
using the seagate untility and it worked like a dream. It formatted,
partitioned and copied the entire contents of C: over to it and finished.
MY impression was that it was bootable.

Now I had two drives , I: and C: both I thought bootable. THis was my
interpretation of the way the utility worked. I then unplugged C; and
powered up I: got as far as "NTldr missing" and that's where I am today. I
have been checking the Microsoft knowledge base and Googling to find out how
to swap drive letter for the last week and come up with a definite "maybe
its possible maybe it isn't, but we don't recommend it". There are an
unknown number of Posts on various boards about how to do it and about a
similar number telling the authors of the how-tos that they are wacko or
their parents made a mistake or........
I sent a desription of the problem to seagate and suprisingly got a
response in about 24 hours. Unfortunately it wasn't very helpful. It gave
some suggestions but recommended that I rebuild the system, not something I
want to do.

At this point I have a stack of reference material about an inch high
and I'm still collecting. I'm kinda pissed both at Microsoft and at
seagate. A change in technology shouldn't require a rebuild. While
microsoft provides snap-ins in XP disk manager to change drive letters there
is no clear indicator that they will handle the way windows handles
start-up.
As to seagate they should realize that people want to swap new SATA drives
for older IDE boot drives.

I'm going to keep at it and if I get it working (or don't ) I'll post the
news.
If you just want to use the SATA drive as non-bootable storage shouldn't be
a problem. If the BIOS on your MB understands SAT it should be simple BUT I
have read a fair amount of issues with drivers for boards that don't do SATA
without an add-on controller.
cio

BTW I chose seagate partly on price and partly on performance.
 
depends on what your current IDE drive is doing. If it is C: and your
boot/system disk then you may have a lot of work in front of you.
I recently bought a seagate 160mb
Click to expand...

milli-bit?

Flip

[snip]
 
Paul said:
"Chief" said:
I'm switching from an IDE hard drive to SATA, before I get myself in trouble
does anyone run a similar config that I have and have any advice?
Will the P4P800 with the latest bios immediately recognize the new HDD and
basically be a plug and pray operation? Or do I need to do any prepping
beforehand?

tia
Click to expand...

There are two ways to use SATA on the Southbridge. In RAID mode, or
in non-RAID mode. RAID mode requires that your board have an ICH5R
Southbridge, whereas non-RAID mode can use either ICH5 or ICH5R.

You have to select the mode of operation in the BIOS.

I'll assume you want a single drive, non-RAID configuration.

There is room for six disks on the Southbridge. Four PATA and two
SATA. If you are using an older OS, like Win98SE, you can only
select the use of four of six. The reason being, that Win98SE
only understands four PATA drives, and by using the BIOS setting
"Compatible", you can make the two SATA interfaces on the Southbridge
take the place of two PATA drives on one IDE cable. This causes
that PATA IDE connector to be disabled. So, two PATA plus two SATA
is an option, and the OS is fooled into thinking the SATA
drives are in fact PATA.

If you have a more modern OS, like Win2K or WinXP, then all
six drives can be used. Select "Enhanced" and set the operating
mode to [S-ATA] in all cases, as that is the only mode that works
right. You select [S-ATA] in Enhanced mode, even if you don't have
a SATA drive connected at that moment.

For non-RAID, I think the drive can be seen without installing a
driver via F6 during install.

If using RAID (WinXP only?), you'll want RAID mode selected in the
BIOS before you start, and then have a copy of the Intel IAAR
(RAID driver) on a floppy, to be installed by pressing F6.
Consult the manual, to find the key combo that allows you to
enter the RAID BIOS, to set up any SATA RAID arrays that you have.
If striping RAID disks, don't install the OS on them, due to the
mess that is caused if one of the two disks fails. You'd have a lot
of trouble recovering from a failure. Mirror mode is OK for a boot
disk, but in any case, experiment with the RAID array, and how to
do maintenance on it (i.e. disconnect a mirror drive, to simulate
a failure, then rebuild the array, after reconnecting the drive,
so you know how to do it - don't use live data until you are
comfortable that you know how to use it).

There aren't too many scenarios that justify these simple RAID
setups. Striped arrays increase bandwidth, but the only time it
would get used, is copying large sets of files. Even a lot of
video editing now, uses compressed formats, so high bandwidth
is not needed. Even capturing video from a DV camera via Firewire,
can be handled more smoothly (no frame drop) via a single disk.
A striped array might make a good Photoshop scratch disk, and if
you regularly use tools that prefer an "input" disk and an
"output disk", two striped arrays, one on the Southbridge and
one on the Promise/Via/Sis RAID chip, is possibly a good way
to work. But for most ordinary tasks, RAID is just a maintenance
headache (more trouble than it is worth). You still need good
backups of your data, no matter whether you use RAID or not
(i.e. say the power supply fries all the disks, by overvolting
+12V).

HTH,
Paul
Click to expand...

Thank you for your post Paul... Yes, I am not going to be using RAID,
atleast not this time, maybe next time I decide to squash my OS I'll give it
a try...
I am running XP and at the moment I have 2 IDE HDD's, a 70gb that is my
bootable and a 20gig I use for storage.
My plan is to use the new SATA (WD 120gb just ordered from Newegg) as my
bootable, and transfer my storage data to my former bootable (the 70gb), and
use that as my new storage disk. At the moment I do have my BIOS settings as
you mentioned (Enhanced, S-ATA) so I think I'm ready for the swap and hoping
that I don't have the issues that the other poster had... That would ruin my
day!
Thanks again
 
could mean micro bit to depends on whose racket your in In any case what's
your point?

flap flop said:
depends on what your current IDE drive is doing. If it is C: and your
boot/system disk then you may have a lot of work in front of you.
I recently bought a seagate 160mb
Click to expand...

milli-bit?

Flip

[snip]
Click to expand...
 
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