I don't think this is for the drivers forum seen as it's more to do with XP setup and how it reads the drives but...

Anyway so I've got it accepting my SI3112 fine and XP setup asks me to choose which drive to install to (hoorah!) however...my PC also has one hard drive that is connected via the older IDE cable. What I want to know is how can I get my PC to say "SATA is first"...right now I get my older drive being recognised first and as a result in setup it says C: is on that instead of being on the SATA connected drive.

This is not possible. The only possibility you have when using Windows Setup is automatic installation to the largest hard drive. (or was it the first hard drive?)

I have 2 hard drives, a 120g partitioned so the first partition is 4gb and is where I currently have XP installed, this is the SATA connected drive. The second drive is 40gb and is connected via the IDE cable.

Last time I installed XP it wrote the boot record to the first partition on the 40gb drive and installed Windows onto the first partition of the SATA connected drive. I don't want this because I want to be able to remove the 40gb drive and my PC not fail to boot up because none of the boot information is on the C:...Windows is on the C: BTW but during setup it's detected as F:.

You will need to disable the Primary or Secondary IDE controller, whichever connects the PATA drive in BIOS. Only then will you will be able to write the boot record to the SATA drive. After installing windows you can go back into BIOS and enable the IDE controller(s).

I also have both sata & ide and mine sets sata the first boot device in the bios ...that makes windows install on the sata drive ....I have a abit board kv8-max3

And I don't disable anything.

Edited June 17, 200422 yr by Tbone2

You will need to disable the Primary or Secondary IDE controller, whichever connects the PATA drive in BIOS. Only then will you will be able to write the boot record to the SATA drive. After installing windows you can go back into BIOS and enable the IDE controller(s).

****. Never thought of that. I was going into the computer and disconnecting the power.

The boot order in my bios doesn’t change anything for Windows setup. Windows still wants to install to the first IDE drive. (NF7-S v2)

The boot order in my bios doesn’t change anything for Windows setup.  Windows still wants to install to the first IDE drive. (NF7-S v2)

I have the same problem with the same mobo. I guess we'd need to take up the issue with Abit really. In reality, since I don't reinstall all that often (hopefully) I just open the case and disconnect the PATA drive.

I have also noticed that if I have a bootable OS on both the SATA and PATA drives, the PATA one boots no matter what I set in the BIOS. Of course, I haven't checked it lately and there have been a couple of BIOS updates, so maybe they fixed that one.

Matt

I also have both sata & ide and mine sets sata the first boot device in the bios ...that makes windows install on the sata drive ....I have a abit board kv8-max3

And I don't disable anything.

Thats because the SATA controller is builit into the south bridge and its native unlike the nforce2 mobo where the SATA channels are PCI based.

The boot order in my bios doesn’t change anything for Windows setup.  Windows still wants to install to the first IDE drive. (NF7-S v2)

I have the same problem with the same mobo. I guess we'd need to take up the issue with Abit really. In reality, since I don't reinstall all that often (hopefully) I just open the case and disconnect the PATA drive.

I have also noticed that if I have a bootable OS on both the SATA and PATA drives, the PATA one boots no matter what I set in the BIOS. Of course, I haven't checked it lately and there have been a couple of BIOS updates, so maybe they fixed that one.

Matt

The mobo manufacturer cannot do anything about it nor can any bios release fix it. This is basically the way the mobo was designed. Unless the SATA is native (Intel mobos and the newer A64 mobos) your boot record is going to be written to your first hard disk, which is the PATA drive on your Primary or Seconday IDE controller.

I DO know ONE easy solution: remove your PATA drives when installing windows.

just unplug the ide cable from the hdd

after all it takes a split second for xp to install the new hdd.. in xp..

Why do you need to go thru all the trouble of opening the case, unplugging the drive, plugging it back in then closing the case when one has to do is to Disable it in the BIOS????

In the end I had to go into the BIOS and disable it...wasn't really happy about having to do that, there really needs to be an option to control the true boot order and drive order on this motherboard - Abit NF7-S 2.0 for those of you wondering which motherboard doesn't seem to let you.

Firstly, delete the boot.ini off your hard drive... then In your BIOS it will have a Hard Drive Boot Priority settings... make sure that "External Device" or "Onboard/Onchip SATA" is the first choice before your IDE drive... then boot from the windows CD and install windows... if all went well the boot.ini will end up on the same drive as windows is installed on... then you can remove your IDE drive at a later date and it will still boot off the SATA drive...

after you change this windows might not boot anymore though as the hard drive id's could be different (if the boot.ini references hard drive 1 as containing windows, then you go and change your boot order, the hard drive that contains windows might become drive 0 this happened to me - to fix it just boot to a recovery console and do a fixboot)

You will need to disable the Primary or Secondary IDE controller, whichever connects the PATA drive in BIOS. Only then will you will be able to write the boot record to the SATA drive. After installing windows you can go back into BIOS and enable the IDE controller(s).

This is not necessarily true. Depending on the motherboard maker, you can choose which drive is the first drive. This adjusts the mappings.