IDE/SATA BIOS Question

N

nits01

New Member
Hello all,
I've just signed up to try an get a question that's bugging me solved.
It's a long one, so I'll try and keep it simple.

I've always had 2 separate physical drives,
1. IDE 40gb Drive.
2. SATA 500gb Drive.

The IDE has always been the boot drive, with my OS (Windows XP sp3) running on that, and all my programs too. The SATA was used for data, music, pictures, videos etc...

Basically, it got to the point where the IDE was getting too full, and I made the decision that I was going to format both, and put everything on the SATA and only use that one drive.

The problem arose when I went to reinstall Windows XP, it couldn't find my SATA drive. It turns out that either WinXP or my motherboard, is slightly too old to be able to recognise SATA drives to boot, or install, or something along those lines I'm not too sure. Regardless, I has told of a 'way' to temporarily get around this:

Going in to BIOS, I set my RAID controller to IDE, which then made the Windows Installer recognise my hard drive so I was then able to reinstall windows.
Now I want to know is this any worse for the system?
I've been running it like this for a bit and have not noticed any lacking performace issues.
But is this making my SATA drive run slower?
Is my computer going to run any slower with it set to IDE rather than RAID?

Thanks for any help I get.
 
It's not that your computer's too old, Windows XP doesn't have very much (well...any :P) native SATA support. Pretty much with any installation you do, you much use some kind of SATA driver disk to load the drivers before you can install Windows XP.

Go to your motherboard's manufacturer's website and look for the SATA drives. Usually they have a specific package that's to be loaded on a floppy. With your driver disk made, start Windows setup. When setup first starts, look for something saying "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver". Press F6 and eventually you should get an option to pick which drivers you'd like to install. From this point you should get the option to partition/format and your 500 should appear.

Also, with some systems, you can make SATA drives act as IDE drives. This might degrade performance slightly, but allows you to install some operating systems without specific driver disks. I try to avoid this method if possible, but is certainly the easiest method, if available.
 
The_Other_One said:
It's not that your computer's too old, Windows XP doesn't have very much (well...any :P) native SATA support. ble.
Click to expand...

You're still being too nice... Windows XP doesn't even allow an install to read the drivers off a CD :rolleyes: It's terrible. I recently bought a rosewill Sata Raid adapter for a work computer and the raid drivers come on a CD. There is no Floppy drive on the work computer, so I literally had take the driver CD to another computer with a CD drive and a floppy drive and copy all the driver files to a floppy. I then had to take the floppy drive out of this computer and install it into the work computer I was working on to read the drivers at XP setup. :(


I endorse T_O_O's response 100% and I will add that you may want to hit F6 repeatedly.. windows tends not to recognize this right away. Also, it doesn't always cooperate with USB keyboards when you are doing this either. Good luck.
 
nits01 said:
Hello all,
I've just signed up to try an get a question that's bugging me solved.
It's a long one, so I'll try and keep it simple.

I've always had 2 separate physical drives,
1. IDE 40gb Drive.
2. SATA 500gb Drive.

The IDE has always been the boot drive, with my OS (Windows XP sp3) running on that, and all my programs too. The SATA was used for data, music, pictures, videos etc...

Basically, it got to the point where the IDE was getting too full, and I made the decision that I was going to format both, and put everything on the SATA and only use that one drive.

The problem arose when I went to reinstall Windows XP, it couldn't find my SATA drive. It turns out that either WinXP or my motherboard, is slightly too old to be able to recognise SATA drives to boot, or install, or something along those lines I'm not too sure. Regardless, I has told of a 'way' to temporarily get around this:

Going in to BIOS, I set my RAID controller to IDE, which then made the Windows Installer recognise my hard drive so I was then able to reinstall windows.
Now I want to know is this any worse for the system?
I've been running it like this for a bit and have not noticed any lacking performace issues.
But is this making my SATA drive run slower?
Is my computer going to run any slower with it set to IDE rather than RAID?

Thanks for any help I get.
Click to expand...
I installed a single SATA drive as my C: drive two weeks ago, and put the old IDE drives in for mass storage. I did as you did in the BIOS.

Since you are using the SATA drive alone and not in a RAID array, your BIOS is allowing you to use it in IDE mode. Windows and your mobo sees the SATA drive as an IDE drive. There is no performance hit, and it is not making your SATA drive run any slower. You do not need any special drivers for IDE mode use. What you're doing is not temporary at all, but required when you're not running a RAID array. You're fine. :)
 
Thanks for the replies.

The_Other_One said:
Go to your motherboard's manufacturer's website and look for the SATA drives. Usually they have a specific package that's to be loaded on a floppy. With your driver disk made, start Windows setup. When setup first starts, look for something saying "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver". Press F6 and eventually you should get an option to pick which drivers you'd like to install. From this point you should get the option to partition/format and your 500 should appear.
Click to expand...

Yeh, I know all about the F6 method. The only problem in this case is that I don't have a floppy drive, and I'm not too keen on slipstreaming the installation cd.

OvenMaster said:
Since you are using the SATA drive alone and not in a RAID array, your BIOS is allowing you to use it in IDE mode. Windows and your mobo sees the SATA drive as an IDE drive. There is no performance hit, and it is not making your SATA drive run any slower. You do not need any special drivers for IDE mode use. What you're doing is not temporary at all, but required when you're not running a RAID array. You're fine. :)
Click to expand...

Thanks, this is basically what I wanted to know.
Am I restricting the performance of my SATA drive by running it as IDE in the BIOS, rather in RAID mode?
Preferably, I'd love a driver zip file I could download, that would have an executable that could install the new SATA drivers on to my system so I could just reboot and change it back to RAID in the BIOS. But no such luck. All I seem to find is zip files to extract to floppy to use in the F6 method.

Any more help is appreciated. Specifically with whether Im restricting performance etc, or finding driver files.

Thanks :)
 
Like I say, since you're only using one SATA drive, you don't need anything for RAID. RAID needs two or more identical drives as well as special RAID drivers. With only one SATA drive, (or even as many drives as you have ports, if you assign a different drive letter to each one) all you need is your regular chipset drivers from either your chipset maker or motherboard maker. You would only need RAID drivers if you set up a RAID array.

You are not restricting performance one bit by using one SATA drive by itself. Want proof? Download and run HDTach.
http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach
 
I'm not too savvy with RAID and RAID arrays sorry.
But because I only have one SATA running in IDE mode, it'll be fine?
But if I was to start using more than one SATA, I'd begin to have problems?

Thanks everyone for the help.
 
Even if you use more SATA drives each with their own drive letter in IDE mode, you'll be fine, I promise. No performance hit. Each drive can operate independently, and you can use their entire space to store monstrous amounts of data.

RAID is used to try to get even more speed out of your drives' data transfer, but at a cost: some RAID arrays have the same data on two drives for backup purposes, other RAID arrays split the data between the two drives. Some people find RAID useful. Me, I'm out to get maximum storage space, not maximum speed.
 
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