Will disabling an SATA port in bios that has drive attached cause any problems?

[bgc99]

My mobo (Asus A8N-Sli Premium) has 4 Nvidia SATA ports. I originally had 2 drives connected to ports 3 & 4. I replaced those drives with new ones and moved one of the old drives to port 2. I discovered that when I went to install Windows that even thought it asked which drive to install on, when I rebooted afterwards that the old drive on Port 2 had become the C: drive and the drive I installed Windows on was F: .

The disk management console would not allow me to change the drive letter of the C: drive because it said it was a "system" drive, even though it had previously only been for storage and had never had an OS installed on it. When I would reboot it was trying to boot from C: and it didn't have Windows on it so no go.

The Bios has the option to disable SATA 1&2, and SATA 3&4. If I disable SATA 1&2 in bios, install Windows , and then reenable SATA 1&2 so that the drive on Port 2 will not be listed as C: will this cause me any problems or cause any harm to the drive or data on it?

Thanks,
BGC

 

[Peter]

Disabling won't harm the drive. It's the reenabling afterwards that will screw up your drive letter mappings just like it does now.

The solution is to wipe the 'old' drive clean properly, preferrably with a disk management tool of some sort.

 

[bgc99]

The solution is to wipe the 'old' drive clean properly, preferrably with a disk management tool of some sort

Can't do that, I have data on that drive that I need.

I know that if I completely disconnect the old drive on Port 2 and install windows, the new drives will map to C: and D:. If I then rearrange the drive letters so that E: is free and then reconnect the old drive on Port 2 it will map to E: and all is well.

I just want to know of I can accomplish the same thing with the Bios disable of the SATA port. I plan on reinstalling the OS again because I'm going to use a different set of chipset drivers than I used on the earlier install and I don't want to have to disconnect everything again.

Thanks,
BGC

 

[bgc99]

FYI for anyone interested, disabling the SATA port worked as described above.

BGC