question about adding a drive

[Dorkenstein]

I am running windows off a 300 gb maxtor sata drive that I have a sata to ide convertor on because I can't get my motherboard to accept it as sata. I have an older EIDE Hitachi drive that I back stuff up onto. I WANT to get the new 150 gb WD raptor with my tax return and put windows on it to replace the hitachi then use the maxtor as a storage drive. Will the raptor work acceptably with a sata to ide convertor? And is this the right use for a speedy drive like the raptor? And if I do this, will all the games I installed on other partitions be junk? I have imaged my windows partition, but I don't feel like installing all those games over again. What else can I do for a smooth transition?

 

[Bobthelost]

It's not the right use, it'll only hurt performance and a bit of a waste if you have onboard SATA.

Maybe you should look at sorting out your SATA first, then use a drive cloning app to copy the files straight from your boot disc to the raptor?

 

[Dorkenstein]

Thanks for responding. I desperately want to use SATA but I am at my wits end trying to figure it out. I gave up months ago trying to get it to work, hence the convertor. What happens is that the motherboard will only detect the hitachi with no OS on it and the SATA one doesn't get recognized. And before I had the convertor, I couldnt even install an OS on it. Do I need a driver on a floppy or something? Because I hunted around for one but never found the right one, or at least one that made a difference. Thanks again.

 

[boomerang]

You need to tell us what motherboard you're using.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Oh, I'm sorry. It's the ECS A754 rev 1.0.

EDIT: And I did try the nforce sata drivers on a floppy those months ago but it didn't help me any.

 

[boomerang]

You shouldn't need drivers at all for SATA with that board.

I'm looking at the manual for your board and it appears that your BIOS should allow for detection of a SATA drive by default.

I would disconnect any IDE drives and with just the SATA drive connected (without the convertor of course), see if the drive is detected.

If not, I would suggest clearing the CMOS and trying again.

You're not going to want that Raptor in there running on the convertor.

Edit: Oh, what version of Windows are you running?

 

[Dorkenstein]

XP Home SP 2.

 

[Dorkenstein]

I just puttered around in BIOS and found absolutely nothing that worked. I hooked the drive back up SATA and then in BIOS I could not get the motherboard to auto detect. In trying to boot it would skip the one hdd connected and go straight to cd rom. Maybe I have a bad drive?