Turning on SATA support on already running system

[sabka]

I have a Albatron KX18D Pro II mobo and till now, just used the PATA hard disks with SATA disabled.

I'm going to start upgrading the system over the next 6 months (due to lack of $-flow) and wanted to upgrade my SLAVE hard drives to larger capacities first (a few 500GB'ers would do) - SATA would be the obvious choice for future-proofing.

Can i just turn on the SATA support on the mobo and plug in additional SATA drives? Is that going to make my PATA not work anymore? Or can they both run simultaneously?

 

[sabka]

nobody has an idea?

 

[KF]

Originally posted by: sabka

Can i just turn on the SATA support on the mobo and plug in additional SATA drives? Is that going to make my PATA not work anymore? Or can they both run simultaneously?

FWIW:

A 3 year old socket A mobo is probably not going to get much response.

I couldn't get any pages to come up on that link. Maybe now is a bad time in Taiwan. Google turned up some cached pages though.

So this mobo has :

2 ATA133 Channels, up to 4 ATA 133 IDE Devices
2 Serial ATA150 Channels, Serial ATA RAID 0,1 (Software)


-->North Bridge: NVIDIA nForce2 SPP (Ultra 400)
-->South Bridge: NVIDIA nForce2 MCP-T
LAN Chip : LAN PHY ICS1893AF
IEEE1394 Chip : TI IEEE1394A TSB41AB2PAP PAP-64
Audio Codec: Realtek ALC650
-->Serial ATA Chip :Silicon Image Sil3112A
I / O Chip : Winbond W83627HF

I don't know what the serial ATA chip is. Maybe some one does? Maybe you could Google it and find out? If it is just an adapter to the nforce controller, than yes enabling SATA would disable some corresponding ATA channels. but probably at least one PATA would remain. (I have one motherboard -not yours- that does it like that.) If the chip is a controller itself, then all ATA would remain available. I guess that't what you want to know. Too bad I don't know the answer. Do you have the manual? Can you download it from Taiwan?

If you have PATA drives on the PATA connector, and they don't work when you enable SATA, you have your answer. OTOH if they do work, you probably have your answer, but not for sure.

Good luck.

 

[Peter]

Well just try - half a minute later you'll know whether your operating system still boots. And if it doesn't, then disable the SATA ports again, or try them in an alternate mode if available (some chipsets have "legacy IDE compatible" and "native PCI" modes for it).