Only one sata?

[tony draper]

Hard disk probs so as is one's custom one just formatted and reloaded operating system(win7 64 bit),have most of my pickies and music on a spare HD (Win XP) both Sata disk,so stuck spare XP in machine alongside the win7 disc with the idea of copying stuff across as is also my custom.
Bios only shows one Sata disk and the machine booted from the spare xp disk,no sign of the newly formatted and loaded disk??
Incidently new disk boots and works fine when in machine by itself.
With IDE kit one could designate one disk as slave and tother as master,which is what I used to do as oft a failed hard disk could be accessed as a slave,so what is the score with Sata disks??
PS managed to recover all my stuff as WIN 7 was saved on separate partition on the as windows old on the formatted disk.
:confused:

[Milo Minderbinder]

Tony
did you format the drive with both disks in place or just the one?

Try removing the XP disk and restarting? What happens then?

With SATA you don't have master/slave. Each disk has its own controller and is defined as a master. You need to select the boot order of the hard drives in the BIOS.
However as the drive isn't being seen it suggests either
drive not connected
drive not formatted correctly
bad drive
disabled in BIOS

things are confused by the way Win7 will create a bootloader partition onto a drive other than the system driver during setup if it finds one - hence my first questions



PS - just what hard disk problems were you getting beforehand?

[tony draper]

Come to think about it I did format the busted win 7 disk from the XP disk,so bios detected two sata disks that time and allowed me to select the xp disk to boot from in setup,hmmm most mysterious,the sata DVD drive chose this time to go TU so I had to dig out a old IDE DVD drive to reload windows from.
:confused:
The original problem with the hard disk was a reluctance to boot and booting into repair mode when it did,then reporting it could not repair disk,I blame it on deleting avast anti virus from the disk as one was fed up with popups from avast demanding money,reckon the buggah did somehing spitefull as it left,
Did the usual thing to try and fix the hd,tried system restore ect but it reported I had no system restore points to restore from,so it had oviously scragged them as well.
Never mind everthing is chugging along fine now.
:)

[Milo Minderbinder]

"busted win 7 disk"

Tony just what was it doing? Maybe it really is broke and thats why you can't see it?
Is it visible in the BIOS?

[tony draper]

Nope as I said above the disk with the newly installed win7 operating sys is fine now minus 100 gig of space it has stashed Windows old upon,never mind, still got 400 gig left which at my age I shall probably never use up anyway.
:)