Sata harddrive problems

Closed
Riley07 - Mar 3, 2009 at 02:36 PM
 Bilge - Sep 1, 2009 at 09:14 AM
Hello, I have a 160G SATA harddrive, but having problems booting up, my OS is Windows XP Home. PC is a Dell Dimension 8400. I have bought a second Sata HD and have installed the OS on to it. But I have no idea how to set the jumpers as have no papper work or markings on the hd to tell me. Is there any way that I can get the data off or set it as a slave HD? If I have both HD's plugged in the PC will not boot.When I go into the system settings (F2) I can see both HD's, but is dosen.t indicate which one is the master or slave. But my CD ROM and CDR do.

If anyone has any advice, it would be much appreciated as I have being wasting all day swearing at my computer.

Thanks

3 responses

xpcman Posts 19530 Registration date Wednesday October 8, 2008 Status Contributor Last seen June 15, 2019 1,825
Mar 3, 2009 at 04:20 PM
SATA drives do not need jumpers. Jumpers are used on IDE (PATA) drives when two drives share a single cable. That's why your IDE optical drives show Master/Slave but the SATA don't.

Did you change the Motherboard connectors when you added the 2nd drive? The MB will boot off the drive connected to the #1 connector unless you change the Boot order in the BIOS. You should swap the cables so that your new drive is connected to the SATA 1 socket.
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Thank you I will give it a go.
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Hi there,

I put my new drive into SATA1 and it boots up with no problems. As sson as I turn on the secound drive in the BIOS. then the PC wont bootup at all. I have tried putting it in SATA2 and 3, the second drive. The second drive has all my data but problems with the OS. As I do not want to format it and loose the data. That is why I bought a new HD and installed XP on it hoping that I could then read the secound drive. I have also tried a repair but no joy. I don't know RAID to well, but would it help if I adjusted that perhaps?

Regards.
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If you do not need jumpers on SATA drives how come the one I just purchased came with jumpers and the usual three choices of cable select, master & slave, if they are not needed why are they on the HDD.

I bought the SATA drive in error, so I then bought a converter with cables to find that I can only use either the SATA drive with a IDE motherboard or the PATA drive with a SATA motherboard.

I was hoping to use the SATA HDD as a master & the PATA HDD as a slave, using the IDE 0 connector on the motherboard.

I also have two DVD drives connected to the IDE 1 connector on the motherboard, and at present this would mean losing one of the DVD drives, which is not very convenient when trying to copy DVDs as it would mean copy all the information to the hard drive.

Do you have any idea how I can achieve my goal?
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xpcman, please accept my apologies, I was looking at the wrong drive, the SATA jumpers are for the speed 1.5 or 3GB.

I was doing it from memory and recalling setting the older drive to be a slave, and remembered noticing the jumper on the SATA drive, and got confused.

As you may have gathered it is my 1st SATA drive.
0
Hi again,

I have just purchased a 40 PIN IDC 3.5" IDE DRIVE CABLE GENDER CHANGER ADAPTOR, I am going to try out my idea of using a SATA drive for the Master HDD & with this adaptor connect a PATA HDD to use as a slave.

I will let you know the results in the near future.
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Thank you, I will give it a go. The original drive was in SATA 0, but you recommend SATA 1.

Thanks again.
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Me and 252 others thank Paul Gu|blog for this answer!

Full article at https://blog.paulgu.com/windows/delete-gpt-protective-partition/

It works!

Note: It installed System Information folder of approx 130Mb, I later connected the drive to a Windows Vista PC, and deleted this folder to return the 130Mb for storage.




"How to delete GPT Protective Partition

In Windows XP Professional, if you cannot access or modify GPT disk, you can convert a GPT disk to MBR by using the clean command in DiskPart, which will remove all data and partition structures from the disk.

1. You may see S2VR HD 5 Drives in GPT status.

2. Go to DOS command line (click on “Start Menu”, then “Run”, type in “cmd” in textbox, and hit “OK”)

* Type in “DiskPart” in command line.
* Type in “list disk” in command line to show all disks in this machine.
* Use “select” to set the focus to the specified partition, for example “select disk 1″.
* Use “clean” command to remove GPT disk from the current in-focus disk by zeroing sectors.

3. Go back to Disk Management, you can see all S2VR HD disks are “unallocated” now. Right click on disk info, choose “Initialize Disk”.

4. Choose all drives in S2VR HD and initialize them.

Warning: This command will erase all data on the disk, so please backup your data first.

Filed by Paul Gu at January 6th, 2008 under Windows"
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