SATA and ATA drives at same time?

Is is possible to run a SATA drive and an ATA drive at the same time on the same mainboard? If so, how? ...'cuz I wanna do it... :cool

I'm planning to run the OS off my SATA drive, which will be the master, and use my IDE drive as a backup/slave for extra storage space. Do I simply set the jumpers on the ATA to slave and gung ho?

Besides this, since my current drive is ATA, how do I move my OS from it to my new drive and make the new drive the primary smoothly and without blowing up my computer?

Both drives are Hitachi Deskstars. The ATA is a Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 and the new SATA2 is a Hitachi Deskstar T7K500. My motherboard does have both IDE and SATA2 capability/slots/cabling.

I'd appreciate any help on this... which is to say, thanks.

 

There is no trouble running both, SATA is just another way of connecting a device.

two have both working, the SATA doesnt require a jumper. In fact, you'll only find jumpers on SATA2 (SATA300) drives and it doesnt crontroll master and slave, but SATA1 or 2 mode (150 or 300).

So plug in the SATA drive, and leave the PATA drive as master, the same as you have it now. The BIOS control which one boots first, so after you're all set up, you specify the boot order there.

Moving the OS to the new drive is the tricky part. The easiest thing to do is Format the SATA drive and install your Operating System on it. Otherwise, you can try to image the existing OS on your ATA drive with a program like Norton Ghost, Acronis TrueImage, or Paragon Drive Backup, and then restore it to the SATA drive-- but you may run into issues with the MBR (master boot record) or partitioning issues, which require more tech knowledge than a clean format of the new drive would (at least in my opinion).

 

This sounds very nice, so lemme make sure I got it straight...

Leave PATA as-is and plug in the SATA. Boot up pc and install OS onto the SATA. Shutdown, restart and set BIOS to boot to SATA drive now. Restart running from the SATA. Finally, uninstall OS from PATA drive?

As you say, it all seems simple except the OS part. I do have my xp professional disk, and, unless I have to wipe the entire drive, uninstalling windows from my current PATA is not a problem. The problem is that I've never done it. I've installed xp onto a blank disk, but I have no idea how to uninstall it. As for imaging, I've heard vague and disturbing rumors about it which have made me want to avoid it like the plague.

Thanks much for your help.

 

The hard drive that you want to wipe, if you boot from the new OS and the old xp is on the other, double click my computer, right click the drive you want to wipe and format, all gone. ed

 

I would use this program to copy the PATA to the SATA: http://www.majorgeeks.com/XXCLONE_d5534.html

If all works well, then format the PATA drive and use it as storage.

E

 

So there is no way to take only the operating system off the PATA without destroying everything in the process? :cry

 

The XXClone will format the target drive. Once you can boot off the SATA drive, you could manually remove all or most of the OS off of the PATA drive. The program will copy the entire disk to another drive and make it bootable (as long as it will fit on the drive).

I would copy the PATA to the SATA drive, and if everything works ok, format the PATA drive and use it for storage. You won't loose anything this way.

E

 

Ok, I'll try it... :major

 

I'd still recommend against that method, and opt instead for the fresh install like you had intended.

First, unplug the PATA drive's power, and plug the SATA in to format and install windows (that way there is no chance of accidentally wiping out the PATA drive). Once you have the SATA drive up and running and tweaked to your hearts desire, plug back in the PATA drive and make sure the BIOS are set to boot the SATA first.

You'll have access to the PATA drive as storage, and once you're confident you dont need anything from the old (PATA) Windows folder or Program Files, simply delete them as necessary.

 

Here's how it went:
I inserted my OS, turned off pc, unplugged PATA, plugged in SATA, formatted SATA, installed OS, restarted and running fine. I installed some drivers for my video and wireless cards, and some firewall/antivirus software. After setting all that up I shut down, plugged in the PATA and booted back up with the SATA. Everything was fine, I toodled about a bit looking at my old drive with the new. After booting up a couple times from the SATA with PATA plugged in my SATA drive stopped loading the OS. I worked with it some (restarting without PATA) and it loaded the OS but a couple seconds after it showed the desktop the drive spontaneously rebooted and continued to spontaneously reboot at the same time over and over again until I manually shut it off. The PATA still unplugged I tried repairing my OS from the cd and it booted fine until the OS loaded when it gave the blue screen of death and said it stopped to save my hardware from damage and began unloading the memory onto the hardisk. It indicated a point in the hardrive that was messed up and although I know very little about such in depth stuff I could see that the bit it was pointing to was one of if not the first bit on the drive judging from all the zeros in its address. So finally I had to manually shut the drive down and am now reformatting it. The only possible problem I can think of is with my wireless card driver. I have had no end of trouble with this wireless card on my PATA, but nothing nearly as serious as what happened with my SATA. Another incriminating circumstance is that whenever I tried to start my wireless card's WLAN monitor (that forcibly takes over from and causes conflicts with windows WLAN management) the SATA gave an angry beep and didn't load it.

I hope all that wasn't too convoluted; I tried to keep it clear. Thanks for your help.

 

the easiest thing to do is get your SATA set up first. leave the PATA unpowered until you get your SATA set up how you want it. then make an image of your SATA drive using any of those ghost/image programs talked about (i prefer Acronis TrueImage).

next, plug in your PATA and make sure the BIOS is set to boot the SATA first. since the lastt ime you tried to do this it worked for a little while and then stopped, as soon as you get into Windows create a folder called PATA (or whatever you want) and start moving items from your PATA to your SATA that you want to keep. just in case of issues, i would highly reccommend (if you have a DVD burner) backing up all files you move from PATA to SATA on a DVD because you ARE going to need to flatten your PATA drive (wipe it out) to get rid of the boot record it currently owns.

I don't know why, but SATA/PATA just don't seem to want to dance together when each has a boot record on them. I've been dealing with that for the last three weeks myself, and this is the only way I have been able to get them work together, and I'm used to having two OS installed at once on different drives and choosing which one I want during loading. I don't need it, I just like it. :cool

Everything should be smooth once you format your PATA drive. Then again, I've been experiencing Murphy's Law with two of my three PCs lately. Perhaps computers are finally starting to take ove and think on their own and they are just really pissed at me right now... almost bad enough to buy a Mac.


I said almost. :major

 

What you say sounds like nice idea... if I could get my SATA to stay running. I'm convinced the reboot problem is not related to the PATA because I reformatted and set up my SATA completely without ever plugging in the PATA and my SATA still has reboot problem. This time I did not install the WLAN monitor program. Instead I merely installed its drivers using add hardware and everything worked like a breeze (i've been trying to figure out a way to get rid of that monitor for some time now :cool). Then I made the mistake of installing my firewall/antivirus software and behold my SATA begins obsessively rebooting again.
Because of this I am convinced that the reboot problem only occurs when I run software (other than OS and drivers) on the drive. This brings me to the annoying, anomalous, and spooky "safely remove hardware" syndrome. The SRHS works like this: I boot up, everything is normal except for a small "safely remove hardware" icon in my taskbar. When clicked upon it identifieth my hardrive as the offending device which needs to be removed! I'm not sure, but I think this should not be happening. My only hope is that I can finds some mystic drivers somewhere for my SATA that will make everything run smoothly again. :major

 

Drivers:
When I look at my SATA drive's driver properties it says they are all find, made my microsoft, and gives me two names: disk.sys and PartMgr.sys neither of which look like they pertain to a SATA controller. But if it has no drives, why is it running at all? When I first plugged it in it was not seen by the system so I went into the BIOS and enabled my SATA ports after which everything worked fine. It didn't say that it installed drivers but then again it didn't seem to need to. Now on the motherboard manufacturer's website I find this driver called "WinXP IDE SATA_IDE driver". There is also a disk that came with motherboard that says "SATA RAID and PATA RAID merge driver" which I ignored since I'm not using RAID. So I've got many strange driver things going on here and am thoroughly confused and, above all, do not want to have to install an entire floppy drive just to install a driver. :mad

 

*wonders why he cannot edit his posts...* rolleyes

So I've now reinstalled my OS for the third time (with 9 straight hours of working on this damn thing) but this time, after finding and installing a floppy drive with much extra pain and travail, I used the nVidia SATA RAID drivers that came with the mobo and I enabled RAID for my SATA drive so that it would run powered by my RAID drivers.

Precisely as before, I booted from my OS disk, reformatted HD (quick format this time), installed XP Pro, installed drivers (other than RAID drivers which had already been installed), installed my firewall program, rebooted, and two ticks after loading desktop the system reboots and starts over just as it used to in the good ol' days.

Btw. As the problem is irregular I did manage to get a BSOD in my former cases with the following error code:

*** STOP: 0x0000007F (0x0000000D, [etc. with a couple more addresses that were all zeros])

I've spent so long fiddling with blue screens and BIOS settings that I've almost forgotten what a GUI looks like

:major

 

Could you be possibly be installing wrong drivers, this sounds more like a conflict with drivers. If the os works fine before any software is installed, it may be anything installed after the fact. ed

 

I don't think that's possible because the first time I didn't (manually) install any drivers meaning, I assume, that Windows/mobo handled it with built in drivers. Then I tried to install the OS again using the SATA RAID drivers that came with the board and those didn't work either. In other words, no, there's no way I could be installing wrong drivers unless the companies that made the drivers made them wrong.

 

Even though nobody seems to be posting on here any more I'll give this a shot.

In the event viewer I came across several groups of warning logs (10-20 a batch) all of event id 51: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244780/en-us
The help and support recommended action was to replace the device. This would be all dandy except that now my old hard drive is also experiencing the same problems. Is it possible that my memory was also damaged and I have to replace both the drive and the memory?

 

In case anybody has my same problem, here is how mine got fixed:
I updated the BIOS (which had a fix for 500 gig HD) and replaced my network card which was crappy to begin with and seems to have had a conflict with my system when I installed the new hardrive.

:major