My current PATA Seagate 80 GB C drive is getting to full.
With recording TV shows nightly at 3 GB for each one hour show, it is taxing it, plus the other stuff on the drive.

Plus the drive is fragmented quite a bit, so I have to run DiskKeeper a lot to keep it down.
Adding shows,, deleting shows frags it a lot.

Picked up a new SATA 2 drive from Newegg, a Seagate SATA 2 drive.
My Asus P4P800 mobos manual tells how to setup a SATA RAID, but not installing just one.

Is it as simple as jut plugging in the red SATA data cable, then booting up. and XP will detect it?

I also plan on using Seagates Disk Wizard to clone the current C drive to the new one, then the SATA drive will be my boot and C drive.
Yes, Seagates software allows you to do this.
No need for a 3rd party app like Norton Ghost if you are using 2 Seagate drives.

When I installed my external USB Seagate hard drive a year ago, Disk Wizard offered to make the USB drive the boot drive by copying the current C drive to it, but I did not want it as the boot drive, it is my backup drive.

My current C drive will then be used exclusively for hold the TV shows and MP3s.

I know when installing a RAID setup you have to push F6 I think when you are installing your OS to load SATA or mobo drivers to put the RAID on.
Hopefully that is not needed to install just one SATA drive.

Plan on tackling this Saturday morning, any help is appreciated.
Thanks,

 

It should be plug and play. It depends on your motherboard. Easiest way to find out is to plug it up and see. You can check your BIOS to see if it recognizes it, or just boot to windows and you'll know. If it doesn't, then you need to have the drivers handy. Your mobo manual should have instructions on how to do this. Serial ATA is much easier to configure than PATA. No jumper settings to worry about... just plug it in and go. Does you PSU have a the right molex power connector? Should look like this:



You can use the older clear/white molex connector, but don't use both!!

Only thing that caught my attention was that you got a SATA2 drive. I think your board is only capable of SATA1 speeds, but SATA2 is backwards compatable so you won't have a problem there. It'll just run at SATA1 speed.

Food for the thought... I know you're planning on building a kick-ass gaming rig soon. I'm a big fan of keeping your OS and programs on one drive then your data on another. My next machine I build is going to have WD's 74g 10k RPM Raptor as my main drive, then a couple of bigger drives configured in RAID (not sure which one yet) to store all my mp3's, movies, files, etc. That 10k RPM drive will make your rig fly. I would like to have over a terrabyte of storage space on the secondary drives. Hopefully by then, 500gb drives will be much cheaper.

Oh yeah, how big is the drive you got?

 

160 GB
http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16822148105

Was going to install last night, noticed my current 300 watt PSU only has the molexes.
I know I can get adaptors, but no worries.
I also will install this over the weekend.
http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16817153028
500 watts.

I need more juice, as my current one will not power the next AGP card I will put in a month or so from now.
Newer AGP cards require at least a 400 watt PSU.

Nice long cables, and they are all sheathed.
http://www.pnw4runners.com/temp/pc_stuff.jpg
Also a silent 120 mm fan.

Yeah, my gaming partner Andy has 2 WD Raptors in RAID 0 on his AMD FX56 gaming rig.
He can start from a fresh format and format and have XP Pro up in 10 minutes or less.
Very fast.

I hope to see an improvement with just the new SATA drive.

My next gaming rig will have 2 of these Seagates in a RAID 0, and then a PATA drive around 300 to 1/2 terrabyte for storage of movies and other non apps.

Yes, the OS and games will be on the RAID, and files and movies and other crap will be on the huge PATA drive.

Oh, plus I think my PSU is starting to go out, the lights in the case are dimming at times, and other stuff.
Almost done with this PC, only going to add a newer AGP card and call it quits on this box.

 

Got it and the power new power supply installed today, what a piece of cake, just time consuming.

First, a picture of the old jungle.
http://pnw4runners.com/tando/pc20.jpg

Regular ribbon cables and unsheathed power wires were not tidy.

First thing I did this morning was to backup my whole C drive to my external Seagate USB drive.
Then I took the case and blew all the dust out of it outside.
Then the old PSU was disconnected from the mobo, and all of the drives it was hooked to.

Put the new PSU in, added the new SATA hard drive, then put the new green UV cables and the red SATA drive cable in.

Then rehooked up all of the power wires and used ties to make the cables smaller, some got tucked up above the top DVD burner.
Most of the wires are all hidden now, and it makes a lot better airflow in the case which will keep it cooler.

I also took out that big dual fan I was using that blew on the mobo and cards.
The PC is super quiet now.
The loudest noise is coming from the dual fan hard drive cooler on the old hard drive.

I set the new SATA drive up as my main C drive, and using the old C drive now as the D drive for storage.
Some have said you need Norton Ghost or another cloning program to copy the contents of your old hard drive to the new one.
Not so!

If using Seagate drives (I only run Seagate, I feel they are the best drives) you can use a free tool from their website called Disc Wizard 2003.

After I booted up the PC for the first time I launched the program, no need to use XPs build in disc manager to format the drive.

Disc Wizard found the new 160 GB SATA drive and asked me if I was going to use it for a backup drive, only drive, or to make it the main C drive and use the old C drive as a new D drive for storage.
I choose the latter one.

It formatted it, then proceeded to copy the old C drive to it.
Once done it shut down my PC and I had to enter the BIOS.
It listed both drives, and all I had to do was tell the new one to be drive #1.

It then put it in another area automatically as the new boot drive.
SWEET :bounce2:

Booted up to make sure it was indeed my new C drive, and it is.
The old C drive is now listed as the D drive.
Pretty cool program Seagate has.

The power supply is virtually dead silent.
This is due to a huge 120 mm fan.

All that is left to do to this PC is to replace my aging ATI 9600 Pro with the ATI X800 XL card.

Here are a few pics of the wiring.
You can see how the PSUs cables are all sheathed, and they and the new green floppy, old hard drive, and the DVD burners green cables are tucked away nicely.

Power off

Power on

 

That does look a lot tidier! Did you notice the performance boost from the SATA drive?

 

Thanks.
Seems a little faster too.

 

A slight glitch, and I wonder if anyone has the answer to this tough one.

When I have the new SATA drive as the boot drive, I can no longer turn on MS Outlook via the email icon in Internet Explorer.
Yes, it tires, but I get a message that pops up on screen that it can not find C:\program~\MS\yada yada yada file name.

Same thing when I hit the email button on the Logitech Elite keyboard.

And yes, Outlook is the default email program setup in IE.
I can change it over to Outlook Express, then hit the mail icon in IE and also hit the mail button on the keyboard and Express will launch!

So for now I am back to using the old hard drive as the boot drive.
I even formatted the new drive with Windows Manager, and it took a long time as it was a full format.
Then I used Seagates Disc Wizard again to transfer the files over.
I bet something is getting corrupt?
Maybe a Registry fix for the SATA drive in the Reg area?

Any clues?
If I can not fix it, the old drive will stay the boot drive until I do a whole system format.
That is not gonna happen anytime soon.
A full format takes me abut a week to recover to get all my apps running again.

 

Sounds like the shortcut got messed up somehow.

Check and make sure the Outlook executable didn't get renamed or something. The directory it resides in is: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11 and it's called OUTLOOK.

Somehow the transfer must have jumbled up the settings in IE... as your keyboard uses the same kind of command for opening Outlook. If you click Start and browse to Program Files | Microsoft Office, can you click on Outlook that way? What about through your quick launch toolbar?

It sounds to me like a shortcut not pointing to the right place kinda problem.

Another directory you might want to check would be C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office. You might just have to rebuild some shortcuts here and there.

If that doesn't work, don't reformat. Just try re-installing Office. You don't have to worry about losing your Outlook email or anything, because that isn't deleted when you uninstall it. The Office CD may also have a repair install you could try.

 

Well, I did format.
Greetings from a freshly formated PC.
First format since two Septembers ago,

Only the new drive is formatted, I can still go back to the PATA drive from the BIOS to make it the boot drive.

What I am doing is starting from scratch on the new SATA drive, and installing my old apps as I get time.

Once it is all done, then I can format the PATA drive, and use the new SATA drive full time for good.

Windows sure installed fast on the new drive.

Vid and soundcard apps & drivers are done, now to reinstall Office on this drive, then import my mail from the other drive.

It is good to format anways, since it has been quite a while.
Hey, maybe once I get this all up and running, I might put the Ubunto Linux on the D (PATA) drive.

If I do that, is there still an option at boot up to switch between drives for an OS, or will I have to do like I am doing now between my two drives from the BIOS?

 

Cool... sounds like a good choice. Nothin like a freshly formatted machine.

When you install Ubuntu to the second hard drive, it'll overwrite the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the first drive with it's own boot loader called Grub. Grub will automatically be configured with both OS's. The default one is going to be Ubuntu at first, but that's easy to change. You could tell it to write GRUB to the PATA drive and just use BIOS to switch them back and forth, but using GRUB on the primary drive is really much less of a headache.

Don't worry about the MBR being written over. It's easy to change back if you want, using the XP cd. However, if you do that, you won't be able to boot to the Linux partition. One way around that is to create a boot floppy for the Linux partition, but I haven't messed around with that enough to give any useful info.

What you might want to do with the PATA drive is partition it to where you can still use it in windows. I do this with my secondary 60 gig drive. I allocated 40 gigs for a FAT32 format, then 20 for the Linux format. You could give Ubuntu as little as 10 gigs, and that'd be plenty of room for the base install plus any apps you'd want to use.

The reason I went with FAT32 on the bigger partition is because Linux doesn't support NTFS very well. It'll read from it, but won't write to it. However, it'll read and write to FAT32. So if you wanna put some MP3's or other multimedia files on that FAT32 partition, you'll be able to use them in both Windows and Ubuntu.