How do you prioritize the boot up for multiple SATA drives?

[The Sauce]

I am planning on building a new system with 2 SATA drives. One drive I am bringing over from an old system with WinXP already installed but I want that to be the backup drive. I want a fresh install on the new, blank drive. How would you specify which drive to use as the boot drive if they are both SATA and you can't specify master and slave?

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: Snatchface
I am planning on building a new system with 2 SATA drives. One drive I am bringing over from an old system with WinXP already installed but I want that to be the backup drive. I want a fresh install on the new, blank drive. How would you specify which drive to use as the boot drive if they are both SATA and you can't specify master and slave?

Easiest way is to not connect the old drive until after you've installed XP on your new drive. On newer boards, you can designate boot priority and also designate boot order. For instance, I can select:

1. HDD
2. CD-ROm
3. Other
4. Floppy

And in a different menu, I can choose which IDE/SATA device to boot from first:

1. HDD 1
2. HDD 2
3. etc.

 

[natto fire]

I second the suggestion of leaving the drive unhooked until XP is installed. I had a slipstream install wipe about 180GB of data after I realized I had connected them backwards. 🙁

 

[dfuze]

Originally posted by: Captain Howdy
I second the suggestion of leaving the drive unhooked until XP is installed. I had a slipstream install wipe about 180GB of data after I realized I had connected them backwards. 🙁

This is probably the best advice. If you leave them both hooked up as you install windows the install will look like it worked, but on the first reboot it will be searching for missing files. For some reason, it puts files on both.

 

[The Sauce]

Ok so I leave the backup drive out, install XP on the new drive, but... then when I install the backup drive later how is XP to know which drive to boot from?

 

[Bob Anderson]

Originally posted by: Snatchface
Ok so I leave the backup drive out, install XP on the new drive, but... then when I install the backup drive later how is XP to know which drive to boot from?

If you install XP on a drive with no other drive connected, then that drive becomes the default boot drive. That's how XP knows.

-Bob

 

[MichaelD]

I'll third (fourth?) what's already been said. Leave your old HD DISCONNECTED until after XP is fully installed on the new drive.

This isn't a scientific comment; Windows is freakin' stupid. :| It will install half the files on the new HD and half on the old one.

In my case, last time I left the old HD hooked up, Windows made my old HD the "boot" drive, putting the NTDETECT, BOOT.INI and the swapfile on the old drive and everything else on the new one. 😕

Needless to say, it didn't work too well.