[solved] ASUS M4A78 Pro- EIDE to SATA

[Xander Ellibre]

Long story short:

I got a new SATA drive but, my OS is on an EIDE drive.

They don't work and play well together.

Tale of drunkeness and cruelty to follow.

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The System in question:

** new mobo. Asus M4A78-Pro.

**XP Pro (32 bit) SP3

**Got the Snazzy Corsair Dominator 6gig memory chipset (**** fan is squeaky at start up) Only 3.25 gig shows Hey, it's windows wha-da-ya-want?

**Got the AMD Phenom II X3 720

**Got the ASUS Lion Square cooler 'cause the Retailer told me the CPU was "black box" and didn't come with a heat sink. Never Trust a retailer. They never know what they are talking about. It came with a heat sink and fan.

(I may use the Lion Square to cool a Peltier TEC on my Beer Wort Cooling device. )

**LSP ultra 750 watt power supply

** slick black Elite case with a neat-O blue LED Power-On indicating light that can blind you.

******Skip to the end to leap frog over the problems and Fixes I had to complete this build.*****

Problems and Fixes f getting this mobo up and running

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First I had trouble getting the sound to work ( the mobo has sound built in) .

The Fix:

This problem is caused by a missing file in XP and has nothing to do with the hardware or the Realtek audio driver. Each time you boot XP it will detect new hardware and request you to install the Microsoft UUA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio. To fix the problem you have to request the hotfix for KB888111.

Click the following link then click where it says View and request hotfix downloads at the top left of the article next to the tools icon.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888111/

Don't bother reading the KB888111 article as that is not particularly helpful. It says that the hotfix is for XP SP1 and SP2 but it works fine with SP3.

When you have requested the hotfix you will be sent an email with a download link to download the hotfix. The hotfix is a self extracting cabinet so double click the file to unzip the contents. You need to enter a password and the password is in the email sent from Microsoft along with the hotfix attachment.

Extract the hotfix & find some directories. They are named for various languages. For English, select the directory named US (or whatever your language).

Open the directory titled US: inside find a directory titled “x86fre.”

In that are 4 self-extracting cab files.

Two of them are titled “kb888111sp1” -&- “kb888111sp2”

The last three characters of the file name denote which Service pack they are relevant to Select accordingly. ( SP3 users: select the SP2 file)

DO NOT double click the cab file~!!

Unzip only.

This because you ain’t going to install the HOTFIX.

All you want are the Cab Files and their data.

When you unzip the Cab files look for a directory titled “commonfiles.” and inside this find the files needed to install the missing Microsoft UUA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio.

Reboot XP

It will detect new hardware

IT will ask for system file “HDAUDBUS”

point to the commonfiles directory where the missing file is.

XP will install the file and that’s all she wrote..

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Then I had trouble with my Printer.

I have two the big dog is an HP laserjet 5 It's a workhorse.

It needs a parallel port. The MoBo hasn't got one.

I went to StarTech and did a pre-sales inquiry told them everything I has what I wanted to do etc.

The PCI parallel port card PCI1P which they recommended totally sucked. It couldn't even get Times New Roman to print right from Word and failed entirely to read PDFs.

Then I tried Perle Systems. I did the pre-sales inquiry; they recommended their SPEED1 LE1P Serial/Parallel Card.

The Perle was the ticket~!!

The Perle card prints PDFs substantially faster than I used to be able from the older mobo.

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http://www.msfn.org/board/style_emoticons/...ult/realmad.gif

************~!!~TO THE POINT~!!~*************

*********~!!~the EIDE to SATA issue~!!~*********

When I built the box I had a rather brand new WD 80 Gig EIDE hard drive.

I did not have a SATA drive.

I had an older near extinction WD EIDE 40 Gig drive too

So which drive do you guess I installed and used for my OS?

Yipper. the 80 Gig EIDE.

Recently I ordered a 500 Gig SATA from Western Digital.

With the usual excitement or boredom ( take your pick) I installed it and ZIP NUTHIN NADA ~!!!

I CAN'T FIND MY NEW SATA DRIVE~!!!

I even tried jumpering it - ha ha SATA's don't need jumpers.

Well it is not exactly correct to say I can't find the SATA Hard Drive.

I can find the drive in the BIOS and I can find the drive in my Device Manager.

And with the cover off I can see it with my eyes.

Ain't technology grand?

So what to do?

How do I migrate my OS to a SATA drive when I can't even see the SATA drive?

How do I boot the PC without the OS? I don't have a floppy drive.

When I built my box I couldn't find a SATA floppy drive for sale.

I could put the OS disk in the CD drive.

Do I need to take the old MBR from the 80 Gig EIDE drive and overwrite that onto the 500 Gig SATA?

Will that even work? Will I ruin my SATA?

Al of this os complicated by the fact of my antivurus/ firewall/bag-O-bolts being Symantec's 360 which is no longer available VIA the Digital River link 'cause they only keep it up for a year.

All my searching has told me that so long as an EIDE drive is set up as the primary with the OS on it you can't get a SATA drive up.

Oh great.

SO then what?

I ordered a VANTEC, IDE to SATA interface for $15.00

It's supposed to make it all better.

Yah I bet.

Any one had this odd confluence of events? OS on an IDE and transferring to a SATA system?

Can I make an Image of my drive in Norton Ghost (Ver 14) and install that onto the SATA drive?

Could it possibly be that easy and simple?

Some how I rather suspect that it'll cause a nuke-you-ler explosion.

Edited December 11, 2009 by Xander Ellibre

[CoffeeFiend]

Only 3.25 gig shows Hey, it's windows wha-da-ya-want?

You're the one who purchased twice as much RAM than your existing x86 OS can use. The x64 "flavor" of Vista and Win7 would use all 6GB just fine (audio would pretty much work out of the box too).

As for the SATA hard drive not being seen, it's most likely because of a BIOS option like AHCI mode, which XP won't see out of the box (requires drivers) unlike newer versions of Windows. Or perhaps it just failed to auto-mount with a drive letter (check in in disk management MMC snapin i.e. diskmgmt.msc)

Migration of OS to another drive should be easy if it's set to IDE emulation in the BIOS. Not that I would personally run XP on a modern box like that.

As for Symantec 360, you couldn't pay me enough to install that junk on my system.

[Xander Ellibre]

You're the one who purchased twice as much RAM than your existing x86 OS can use.

Yah that's me. I was the one with the funny hat.

There was a rebate for buying the extra and of course it made sense to have well matched memory if I change the OS in the near future and can suddenly put all that extra baggage to use. So it all sorts itself out in the wash. Besides what's a couple of dollars?

I have never been a fan of new operating systems. I'd prefer that they were around for a few releases to shake the bugs out. Seems to me that the manufacturer wants to send the first crop of purchasers out as pioneers to Field test the thing and I watched old westerns as a kid so, I know what happens to pioneers.

Yah I got angry with Symantec. I was a big fan of Peter Norton, back in the day. Still have a floppy version of the old DOS "PC Tools."

Then they had their little turf war with McAffee and eventually they followed suit in their coding simply making their software one huge monolithic beast that takes over your box and cuts performance to about a fifth of what it ought to be. .

But, in their defense I have never gotten an infection while using their software and I've been a naughty boy on the internet surfing places and down loading things that would make mom weep.

With 360 they got rid of a lot of the crap that plugged up your system and then ruined the effort by dumbing down the interface.

I guess their marketing people figured out that most people are sort of dumb or simply disinclined to learn things if they can possibly avoid it.

Ya gotta admit computer knowledge has limited crossover application in most people's lives.

I mean, when was the last time knowing how to unwind an NTFS allocation table system did you any good when doing anything else?

I suppose some day I should bite the bullet and learn linnux.

But this isn't Honeywell and it ain't someday.

Anyway I'm waiting with 'bated breath (not baited) for the arrival of my interface gizmo.

I'll see if it solves that "no can see" issue my file manager is having.

I think it's weird that my device manager can see it and reports that it's operating properly, and the BIOS can see it, but the Explorer File Manager can not.

Edited December 9, 2009 by Xander Ellibre

[Xander Ellibre]

solution:

WhileI am sure there is a more elegant way to accomplish what I needed, this was pretty easy.

STEP ONE

I installed the 500 Gig SATA drive

I unplugged my C drive

I set the BIOS to boot from the CD

I inserted the XP program OS disk

I let it go about installing itself

The XP Set Up observed that the SATA drive was unformatted

I directed it to partition (in half) and format the drive

For whatever reason the microsoft engineers (glory term) failed to include an option to format the other partition.

Then

STEP TWO

I hooked up my EIDE C drive and booted.

I set the BOIS to boot from the EIDE drive

It booted fine

I navigated to the partition on the 500 Gig SATA drive and deleted everything including the hidden system files

Then

STEP THREE

I repeated step one and this time directed the XP set up program to format the other partition.

then repeated Step Two.

All is well