Serial Harddrives

[Henderson]

I'm installing the Asus A7N8X Deluxe mobo and putting in a 120GB serial drive.

Can I also have an EIDE drive hooked to that as a slave on the same IDE channel (and take advantage of the serial connection to the 120GB)? The second IDE channel will have the dvd and cdrw drives on it.

Thanks.

 

[EeyoreX]

I think you may be a little confused about SATA... There is no "second channel" for serial ATA at this time. Current SATA has one channel per plug. Therefore only one SATA drive per SATA header. SATA and IDE can coexist in the same box, but there is no master/slave relationship. So, more likely than not, you will be doing something like this:

SATA: Boot drive
IDE1: DVD drive

\Dan

 

[Henderson]

Doh that's right, that was worded wrong. There are 2 Sata connectors on the mobo, plus the 2 IDE. So is it possible to have one harddrive connected to the primary SATA channel, and the 2nd one connected to the primary IDE channel? So the dvd and cdrw drives would be on the 2nd IDE channel then?

I've always stuck to Abit mobos, this is my first Asus... I will say Abit documentation beats Asus hands down.

 

[Audiofight]

Yes, you can use the 2 IDE channels to install up to 4 drives, just like any other mobo every created.

The SATA can allow you to hook up 2 additional hdds. Unless you are running WinME or previous OSes. I have read in my booklet that Win98 can only handle 4 devices, so the SATA will have problems. Maybe this is something new to my P4 setup, but it wouldn't surprise me to see another shortcoming of Win98.

 

[Henderson]

Thanks. Have one more question.

Is there a utility that will do a mirror copy of a harddrive onto a new drive of all the drivers, system files, etc. so you won't have to reinstall everything again?

When I ordered the serial drive, they acccidentally shipped the ATA instead, so instead of having no computer for 4 more days, I'm setting it back up with the old 40 GB drive, hoping to just do a mirror copy like that.

Please tell me it's possible.

 

[Audiofight]

Norton Ghost is exactly what you are looking for....it will make a perfect image of a drive and you can burn it to a cdr or cdrw or just load the image onto another hdd.

 

[bozo1]

Why buy Ghost when all drive manufacturers have a free utility you can download to do exactly that? Did I mention it was free?

 

[Henderson]

Thanks, will check out the freebie of course!

 

[Henderson]

Ok, I'm not getting anywhere with doing this, probably need a certain sequence to happen.

I have the Asus A7N8X Deluxe mobo newly installed (with AMD 2500+XP). Currently I have 2 harddrives on IDE Channel 1 (40 GB master, 13 GB slave), and a DVD and CD-RW on IDE Channel 2. SATA jumper is set to disabled, the SATA drivers are not installed yet (booklet said don't install without a serial drive in place, it can cause system instability).

I want to install the 120 GB serial drive now and copy over the full contents of the current boot drive, the 40 GB. Once everything is copied over, will make the 120 GB serial the boot drive and the 40 GB the 2nd drive. I'm getting a lot of Disk Boot Drive not found how I'm trying it.

What exactly is the sequence I should be doing?

I'm thinking install the SATA drivers first with system as is. Shut down, switch SATA jumper to enabled on mobo. Leave 40 GB as is, set as master. Install 120 GB serial drive, connect to secondary SATA channel? Boot up, check BIOS which will probably show no second hard drive since it won't be formatted yet.

Will that sequence get me to boot up so I can format the 120 GB and copy over the contents of the 40 GB to it? Once that's done, then switch the jumpers on the 40 GB to slave? And move SATA cable to Primary SATA connection?

The end result should have the 120 GB serial on primary SATA connection; 40 GB EIDE drive on IDE channel 1; DVD and CD-RW on IDE channel 2.