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Quick HDD questions

Apocalypse23

Apocalypse23

Golden Member
Hi guys, just a few simple questions here. I recently bought a 200GB MAXTOR Sata drive, i've never used Sata before so i'm kinda new here. My older 80gb maxtor ide/pata drive(partitioned with old winxp installation) is being used as a backup storage drive. A friend also gave me 2 160gig ide/pata drives a few days ago.

Anyway so theres a weird problem that I came across. Whenever I install another drive my windows bootup freezes up. Now the Sata drive is my main HDD, with a fresh copy of windows installed just a few days ago(new build), it seems that if I shutdown my comp to install another drive (the 80gb at first, now one 160gb), my comp freezes up at the loading screen(when windows is loading with that moving slider). The only way I can fix it, is to shut my comp off again, and change the sata connector. I have 4 sata connections on my DFI board (sata 1, sata 2 and so forth), basically, pulling it out of one and putting it into any other one allows my system to boot properly. It's not a big deal, since I can still boot, and I won't be installing a lot of drives in the future, but it's still weird and annoying.

Another thing is, windows seems to be inaccurately reporting my drive sizes. For instance my C drive (main sata, 200gb) is being reported at 189gb, my 160 is 152gb etc. SpeedFan reports them as 203.9gb and 163.9gb. Oh and I also keep seeing this annoying 'safely remove hardware' thing because of my sata drive but I hear thats normal.

Edit: Also I was wondering if it's possible to raid two 160gb ide/pata drives(identical), I don't really know much about raiding. =P

Thanks everyone!
 
I did some research about the drive size problem, and this is what I found:

"According to manufacturers:
200GB = 200,000,000,000 Bytes

So take that and traslate it into computer definition terms:
200,000,000,000 / 1024 = 195,312,500 KiloBytes
195,312,500 / 1024 = 190734.86 MegaBytes
190734.86 /1024 = 186.26 GigaBytes "

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=615

lol thats just great. Anyway it's far from a big problem since I have enough space as it is. Still don't understand the SATA prob though.
 
Heres an update to that weird sata bootup problem. I encountered it again this morning and turns out that if I wait long enough (a couple of minutes) Windows will resume loading again. That progress slider starts to move, and I get to log in.

Still no idea why it does this and it's getting annoying cause I need to reboot frequently as I am testing some overclock settings.

In the meantime i'll try running tunexp and bootvis, see if that helps anything. It also occured to me that it might be because of bad sata drivers but I think my Dfi lanparty nforce 4 would come with them preinstalled, i've also got all the latest nforce drivers installed and no conflicts shown in my device manager. I do have TWO "Nvidia Nforce 4 ADMA Controller" entries, but I don't think that matters. Thanks.
 
Okay the ol' unplug/replug sata cable trick doesn't work anymore. Still takes about 1min and 28 seconds to boot up. Bootvis says that Disk Write Caching is disabled, but I can't find a way to enable it. Rightclicking/properties my disk in device manager doesn't help, as I can't see any option for disk write caching. Please advise, thanks.

Oh and here is my drive setup:
-Sata 200gb in Sata slot 1 (configured to boot from bios)
-IDE 160gb as master
-IDE 80gb as slave
 
Using the Nvidia Nforce 4 ADMA Controller I managed to check my drive, and it says that disk read/write caching is enabled. SO is command queuing.
 
Just hoping I might be able to help others who might be having a similar problem. The issue was not with command queuing, or switching around sata cables, i'm 90% sure it had to do with the nforce ide drivers. I uninstalled them and don't seem to be having any problems so far. I also uninstalled the nvidia firewall since that started giving me BSODs. Everything seems alright now and I hope it stays that way.
 
Originally posted by: Apocalypse23
Just hoping I might be able to help others who might be having a similar problem. The issue was not with command queuing, or switching around sata cables, i'm 90% sure it had to do with the nforce ide drivers. I uninstalled them and don't seem to be having any problems so far. I also uninstalled the nvidia firewall since that started giving me BSODs. Everything seems alright now and I hope it stays that way.
Click to expand...
Yep, that's the ticket. Just keep the buggy SW IDEs and ActiveArmour out of your install and nF4 chipsets are sweet 🙂

 
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