Hard drive help

[Alex843]

Because of some issues I am having with my primary hard drive, I am now realizing that possibly it may fail soon, and I will loose all my data. I do have a slave hard rive that is a SATA 160 GB Maxtor drive and I’m in the process of copying all important data onto it just in case. My primary drive is an 80 GB IDE drive and is almost full. I want to purchase a new hard drive, and I’m not sure if I want to get a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB Hard Drive SATA drive or a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus10 300GB Hard Drive EIDE drive. They have mostly the same specs except for the difference in interface and are within ten dollars of each other. I am, because of previous experiences with SATA drives, a little hesitant about using them for a primary boot devise. Just setting up my secondary SATA hard drive so I could use it for storage was enough to make me want to gouge my eyes out. I also know that windows XP does not recognize them as a hard drive will not let you use install XP on them. While there is what seems to be a very complicated process of BIOUS tweaking and driver installations to set up a SATA drive as boot; I don’t know if it is worth it even if it is a little faster. My fist question is if I were to buy a SATA drive what are the steps I can take to use it as a primary boot device? My second question is regardless of what hard drive I choose; I would like to be able to copy all of my file from my old hard drive onto the new one, while this should be that hard, I’m am wondering if I could boot from it as well; by just copying the entire drive onto another?

[richh0323]

Useing SATA drives for boot shouldn't give you any problems, as long as you're M/B is setup to handle them. Make sure you have a few 3.5" floppys handy and copy the files you need to set them up. Check with you're M/B manufacturer as to what type you need. Go with the Maxtor 6B300S0, I think that is the same as what you listed as + Maxtor 's software willl help you transfer all you're files when you set up, to make it easy just leave you're old hard drive in, dissconnect all the rest (except boot drive) One thing if you don't have a SATA type M/B and are useing a PCI SATA card, you will not beable to use SATA for boot, just mass storage.

[Alex843]

Thanks for the reply, I have a ASUS K8VSE Delux, it does have two SATA ports on the motherboard, so it can work, the reason why its hard to use SATA drives on my computer is because IDE's controled by Fast track, and SATA's are controled by VIA and therefore SATA don't show up in the BIOUS. Thanks for you your help.