Buying a SATA Drive and Using it as my Master OS Drive

[dw84uk]

1) (many use the sil3112 or 3114 controller)

what is this and how i know which one i have and does it matter

 

[dw84uk]

also, can I buy a SATA 2 drive? I don't think my motherboard supports SATA2 but I presume they are backwards compatible?

 

[Ste]

It is, it will run @ SATA 1 Speeds.

 

[dw84uk]

ive got my new harddrive

when i press f6 it loads for a while and says it cant find the disk and to enter a floppy with the drivers on it

where do i get these drivers from?

 

[dw84uk]

edit

 

[dw84uk]

okay i have got my SATA drive up and running

now when i start up, it asks me to choose which OS i want to run, the one of my old IDE partition or my new SATA partition.

i only want the one on the SATA partition but when I try to format the IDE OS in Windows it won't allow me (presumably because there is an OS on it)

How can i format it?

 

[krazefinn]

You should be able to, sure the account has administrator rights?

You might try to delete the OS files first, and then go back to disc management tools. I've never seen the situation where one was unable to format any drive.

Another option is to disconnect sata, go to install XP on the 20gb partition, and simply format from there, without completion of install. Then recconect the sata drive.

 

[dw84uk]

i'll try that

just got the blue screen of death on my new SATA

 

[Snake-Eyes]

You MUST boot from the copy on the SATA drive to unformat the Windows partition on the IDE drive.

 

[dw84uk]

how do i just format the drive and not install xp on it again? is there a way to format it and then quit?

also, when i delete the 20GB partition after the format, i'm still worried i will lose A LOT of data on the other partition on that drive which is about 220 gigs worth.