Urgent New SATA HD problem

[terrelli]

I have a ASUS A7N8X Deluxe MB, Windows XP, and two Maxtor 80Gb drives, one drive is used for system etc and the other for backup, pics and videos etc. However my system drive is getting full so i decided to invest in a seagate 200Gb SATA drive assuming that SATA and IDE can operate together. The plan was to clone my current system onto the new SATA drive.

However my PC does not recognise the drive? the Asus A7N8X has an onboard raid controller which will not allow me to set up a single SATA drive. What can i do? otherwise i may return the SATA drive.
Should i disable the SATA jumper on the MB? would this recognise it as a single SATA drive?
Or should i just by another Seagate 200Gb SATA drive and set up a raid 1 (mirror) and clone my system onto the raid 1 set up?

 

[terrelli]

i have updated the SATA controller with the lastest driver from nforcershq.com.

Do i need to update the MB with the lastest Uber bios? cant think this would make much difference?

The operating system does see it as a SCSI drive!!? but does not show in win explorer?

 

[uberhund]

Well, I don't know the board, but with the nForce2 NCP and Silicon Image serial ATA combo on that board, yes I guess I would update the system bios as well as the Nvida drivers. This mobo uses "fakeraid" in software, and uses dirvers that identify as SCSI. If the SI "RAID" software & drivers are really installed there may be an installation proc before the drive shows up, even if you are not using RAID.

 

[terrelli]

The links you posted Wusy opened to blank html pages?

 

[pat]

The operating system does see it as a SCSI drive!!? but does not show in win explorer?

It wont see it until you go to the administrative tools/computer management/disk management and correctly initialize the HDD..

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[terrelli]

Thanks Pat, I am formatting the drive as i type this, next question is as follows, i plan to clone my present system on the 80Gb PATA drive onto the new Seagate 200Gb SATA drive (using norton ghost 2003), how do i configure my system to make the new SATA drive the boot and systen drive?

 

[pat]

I have no idea, I never tried cloning. But in BIOS, the boot sequence should be SCSI (for SATA controller) and HDD disabled. this way, it wont try to boot from the old drive.

I have no exact plan.. experiment..

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[terrelli]

Thanks again, i will set the boot sequence as you stated, i will let you know how the cloning goes.......

 

[Crashman]

I have a suggestion: Make 2 partitions on your new drive, one slightly larger than your system drive, the other to use up the rest. Then use PowerQuest Drive Image to make an image on the larger second partition.

Turn off the system and disconnect the IDE drives. Start the system and make it boot from CD first, onboard RAID controller second. Boot off the DriveImage CD and "restore" the image to the smaller new partition. Check the options box for "make drive bootable".

When you're done, your system should boot with the new system partition listed as C: Make certain everything works, shut down, and reconnect the old drives.

The method I told you gets around Windows drive letter assignment issues, the old drives will get new letters. And remember, DriveImage can upsize, but not downsize, a partition image, so the system partition has to be at least as big as the original system partition.

Oh, the boot issue for loading the DriveImage CD is the same as booting the XP CD, you'll need a DRIVER FLOPPY and the F6 command to load the third party drive controller drivers (silicon image).

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