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sata ports

monkey333

monkey333

Senior member
Long story, but I swapped out identical motherboards. the "new" one has a faulty on board net card, so i wanted to slap a pci card in to fix that. The only 2 pci slots have sata cards in them hooked to hard drives. my thought is to move the 2 drives from the pci card to the on board sata ports. this going to screw anything up? I'm running WHS and they are part of the drive extender.
 
I haven't done exactly what you are proposing, so hopefully I won't miss anything. And it'd be best to give details on what each disk does and the exact disk controller chips involved for the reasons that I'll detail below.

Remember that XP/2003 (the basis of WHS) can't adapt well to a new disk controller connecting the boot disk. If neither of the disks you mentioned is the System disk, then there shouldn't be a boot problem. But if one is a System disk, and if the old disk controller drivers won't work with the onboard disk controller, you may have a boot problem. This can likely be fixed by performing a reinstallation of WHS (NOT a new installation, which will cause the loss of all indexed data from the new WHS system).

No matter what, make sure that the WHS System disk is at the top of the BIOS boot list after you've moved around the SATA ports. It's not really necessary right now, but if you ever have to do a Reinstallation of WHS, you'll need the old System disk at the top of the boot order or the WHS recovery routine won't detect a previously-installed WHS system and will only allow a new installation of WHS.

Depending on the disks and the controllers, it might be best to consider a Reinstallation of WHS. This would give you the chance to introduce the drivers for the disk controllers as you do the reinstallation, so you can be sure that the System disk and the data disks will be readable by Windows as WHS attempts to recover the system and the data.

Note, though, that WHS will lose any client PC backups if you do a Reinstallation. If this is important to you, you'll need to "back up the backups" and move the backup folder to the "new" system after reinstallation of WHS. This procedure is covered in Mcirosoft's white paper on how WHS backups are managed.
 
the system has 7 drives in it, and the 2 i want to move are just data. the board has 4 sata ports and 2 of them are used so i'm thinking it should not be a driver issue. i just don't want to reinstall whs and jump through all the hoops of off loading the data then starting all over with the data i have on those drives.... I was hoping to wait for vail to have to do this.
 
As these are "PCI" sata cards (re: probably pretty cheap), they typically will allow you to move the two "data" HD's from them to an onboard without issue. usually you only really get into trouble with higher end controllers that do special things and have special drivers. If these are the typical $20-40 specials, chances are they are in simple IDE mode or very basic AHCI anyway so moving them should work fine. You are likely even to see performance increase by connecting to the MB SATA ports as they are generally much better and have higher bandwidth available than the cheap PCI add-on card controllers.
 
monkey333 said:
the system has 7 drives in it, and the 2 i want to move are just data. the board has 4 sata ports and 2 of them are used so i'm thinking it should not be a driver issue. i just don't want to reinstall whs and jump through all the hoops of off loading the data then starting all over with the data i have on those drives.... I was hoping to wait for vail to have to do this.
Click to expand...
A "Reinstallation" of WHS doesn't cause any shared data to be lost. WHS writes the new WHS on top of the old one and then reindexes all the files on the data disks.

But you shouldn't need to do a reinstall. Just be sure that the drivers for the onboard SATA disk controller are installed in WHS before you do the switch. It's important that WHS find those data disks when it boots or it will declare them "missing".

Personally, I wouldn't do this kind of operation without a full backup of any important data. But that's just me.

Even if you end up with a couple of "missing" disks, you can always "remove" the disks (through WHS' Management Console), copy one disk's files elsewhere, and "add" the disk back to WHS. WHS will reformat the disk and you can now copy the contents of the second disk back into WHS. Finally, you can re-add the second disk (and get it formatted by WHS) and then copy the contents of the first disk back to WHS. When you "remove" the disks, WHS will remove them from its file index and add them back again when you copy the files back into the WHS shared folders.
 
I got 3 choices.
Switch to on board sata
put the old motherboard in and swap cpu and heat sink
buy a usb to ethernet adapter for 25 bux.

I'm thinking of opting for #3.

I suppose I could grab the 2 drives and slap them in somewhere else and see if anything is on them.
 
my google-fu must not be up to par, maybe I'm not sure what I'm looking for. If you know any off hand that would be great...
 
IF you are going for a WHS reinstall I'm going to recommended you use the X-Files edition.

They've included many more drivers than the origional WHS including the cheapo SATA expansion cards.
 
If I can fig out which ones they are in whs, I think I can remove them from the pool and whs will pull the data off and copy them to one of the other drives if I understand that process correctly.
 
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