Booting PC from ATA PCI card??

[machintos]

So I'm building my first PC ever, and i'm gonna be installing 200GB + 160GB HDDs.

I'm using P4G8X-DLX which doesn't support ATA 133, so I'm gonna be running the HDDs from the PCI card.
Is it possible to boot windows from the PCI card and not the primary IDE on the mobo?
I'm using the secondary IDE on the mobo for my cd drives.

Thanks

 

[jackschmittusa]

You should be able to boot from a drive on the card. You select the boot sequence in the bios. ATA133 offers no current benefit over ATA100 as today's hd tech can barely reach ATA66 speeds. You loose nothing by connecting those Maxtor drives to ATA100 ide channels on the mobo.

 

[machintos]

So it's okay connecting HDDs that are larger than 137GB to ATA 100?
I heard that I could lose data this way?

Sorry for the questions, I'm a noobie in PC building...

 

[Peter]

UDMA-133 is just an interface speed rate. This is not at all connected to 48-bit LBA addressing, which is what you need for those large drives above 128 real GB (137 marketing "gigabytes").
Plenty of BIOSes around that can do 48-bit LBA on UDMA100 IDE channels. So if you can, stick with the chipset's own IDE channels, since these are on a massively faster bus than anything on PCI.

 

[machintos]

Thanks for the replies guys, Hopefully I can finish building my PC tonight

 

[machintos]

Well, I'm trying to install my XP now, but it's showing that I have 2 drives with 131062MB free space?

Why is this? Don't I supposed to have 200000MB and 160000MB free space?


Thanks

 

[EeyoreX]

Windows XP will not see the space after the 137GB "barrier" until after you install Service Pack 1 (free download from the MS website). So if you are making a partition to install Windows XP of say, 20GB and leave the rest as free space, install Windows, get the Service Pack, then your drives should be recognized to their maximum capacities. This should be the case, and has worked in my excperience.

As for your final hard drive capacities listed, they will not be for the full 200GB and 160GB. Manufactureres use a decimel measurement (where 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) when they should really use a binary measurement (where 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes) So, your reported drive totals should be about 186GB for the 200GB drive and 149GB for the 160GB drive.

Hope everything works out, let us know if you need more help!

\Dan

 

[machintos]

Originally posted by: EeyoreX
Windows XP will not see the space after the 137GB "barrier" until after you install Service Pack 1 (free download from the MS website). So if you are making a partition to install Windows XP of say, 20GB and leave the rest as free space, install Windows, get the Service Pack, then your drives should be recognized to their maximum capacities. This should be the case, and has worked in my excperience.

As for your final hard drive capacities listed, they will not be for the full 200GB and 160GB. Manufactureres use a decimel measurement (where 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) when they should really use a binary measurement (where 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes) So, your reported drive totals should be about 186GB for the 200GB drive and 149GB for the 160GB drive.

Hope everything works out, let us know if you need more help!

\Dan

Thanks for the explanation dan.
Do you know when, during building my pc, should I format the HDDs?
Also, could you tell me how to clear my boot HDD because I want to start over.

Thanks a lot

 

[EeyoreX]

No problem.

I would format only what you will use for your Windows partition. 10-20GB should be enough. I do 20GB just to make sure I have plenty of space to play with. Let Windows install and then create the remainder of your partitions and format them within Windows. This way you will have complete control over how small/large you want to make your partitions (instead of creating partitions up to the 137GB barrier and then having small partitions after the barrier, once SP1 is installed).

As for clearing your boot hard drive, start your Windows XP install as normal. When it gets to the point where it asks you where you want to install Windows you can select any created partitions and delete them before creating a new one for the OS to be installed on. You could also use your drive manufactures utility floppy disk, but IMO that just adds an uneeded step when the Windows XP installer can take care of it. Good luck!

\Dan