New Vista Machine/new sata mobo, using ide drive as storage

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brumjckey

New Member
Just bought a new Gateway GM5420 with SATA mobo and drive. I have a 200 gb IDE drive that I want to slave in, but the machine won't boot with that drive plugged in. Help! I have lots of pictures, not to mention WoW installed on the IDE drive. What to do, what to do?!?!?!?!?!?
 
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One quick answer to that quesion is the boot order set in the bios. Once you added the 200gb ide drive the boot order arrangement was changed. The ide controller will automatically supercede the sata. To correct this you need to go into the boot order section in the bios setup and press enter on "hard drives". That should bring up a menu of hard drives installed. You then use the plus or minus key found on the Numpad to move the sata upto the top of the list and choose the exit and save option upon leaving the bios.
 
S-ATA doesn't have master/slave. The IDE drive must be set to 'Master' and also it must not be picked up in the BIOS as the primary boot device. This should give you the storage you want. Post back here if it doesn't work.:)
 
The 200gb ide drive has to be set as master on the primary ide cable. Sata drives either are seen as sata master #1, #2, #3, #4, or as an array. By default however the ide drive was aet as the first in the order when added. The ide controller overrode the sata. The quick trip into the boot devices section of the bios will see this corrected. Not only do you set the hard drive item as the first boot device but there's usually another menu showing the drives by their model numbers.

You may also see a cardbus item there too. You simply highlight the sata and use the plus or minus key to bring that to the top of that list followed by pressing the F10 key or using the save and exit option when leaving the bios. The support page for that model Gateway is seen at http://support.gateway.com/s/PC/R/1014159/1014159nv.shtml
 
imo, pata is too slow for massive storage.

I'd recommend installing your o/s on the PATA, and put your paging file on the SATA drive, as well as your storage.

This will give you the best performance, and most storage space.
 
Originally the second partition on the second ide drive installed saw a storage partition for large files. The new sata twice the size is now used and may see a few more added. But this is on a custom build not on a system with a preinstalled OS. The WoW and other programs installed to the old drive would have to be reinstalled since that was done on another system with a totally separate Windows installation seen there.

Once the bios settings are correct you can try reinstalling WoW and anything else if the partition is still easily accessible. The first item of concern would be file retrieval in the event a reformat is needed. The drawback seen when custom installing programs to other then the OS drive is when adding in a new host or like seen there going onto a different system. Everything has to be reinstalled all over again.
 
Well If you have a portable hard drive you can install XP on that, boot from it, the rescue your data into your portable drive and then formatting the IDE hard drive.
 
If you have two internal drives installed you can also use a live for cd Linux distro for copying files from the drive you intend to clean and reformat as well. Knoppix and others have live versions that run totally off of the cd-r you burn the iso image on. If you can't copy directly from one MS drive to another that can bail you out at times.
 
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