PCTech Forums

I had an IDE drive fail on me a few weeks ago (detailed in another thread) and need to replace it.
I am thinking of going SATA due as they are supposed to be faster.

I am running Win XP SP2, and the main system drive is IDE.
Am I correct in thinking that the SATA will need to be set as Secondary Master in the BIOS (since it will be the only SATA drive in the machine and obviously I don't want it recognised as the boot drive)?

Any pratfalls to watch out for?

Hi Jemmo

Check to make sure your motherboard will take a SATA drive. You'll notice a pick up in performance with that drive set as the boot drive. Boot time is cut in half. Having it as a secondary drive should be OK. Your system should boot to the OS on the IDE drive as long as the SATA has no operating system on it.

If the system won't boot, you might have to go into the bios under boot order and select the IDE drive as the first device.

Cheers icecube.

Sounds too simple.




I'll be back when it doesn't work!

Yep - it worked.

Just had to enable SATA in the BIOS and set it to auto-detect, partitoned and formatted using Windows Disk Manager and away she goes.

Cheers again icecube.