SATA HDD and Windows XP

[Meclar]

Has anybody added a SATA hdd to Windows XP?

[Mo]

Sure. What's up?

[Meclar]

I didn't realize when I bought the drive that Windows XP doesn't recognize SATA drives without some tweaking so I posted this on the MSI forums and waiting for some advice:

What I'm trying to do is keep my current IDE HDD in place as my primary drive with my OS on it and add this Seagate 80gb SATA II NCQ HDD (shows as ST3808110AS).
What I've done so far is physically installed the SATA drive and booted Windows.  Windows did not recognize the drive at all.  I checked the BIOS and it did see the drive.  I took time to read up on this problem and came back to it by enabling, in the BIOS, the RAID controller.  Windows then recognized the new hardware but as Unknown and I was unable to format/partition it.  At this point the BIOS still recognized the drive plugged into the SATA primary on the motherboard and the RAID or SATA BIOS booted also but I did not make any changes to it as I did not see any reason to do so.
Again I took time to read up on the problem and ran MSI live/online and found several new updates, one specifically for the motherboard and hastily took the option to flash the BIOS in Windows mode (may not have been the best idea).  This only seemed to set my BIOS settings to default.  I don?t know what my BIOS version was before I ran this update.
Where I?m at now is the SATA is unplugged as Windows will only show it in Device Manager as Unknown and since I ran that BIOS flash I now have a floppy drive listed in My Computer but none physically installed.
Am I going to have to manually update the BIOS via CD, floppy or USB/flash drive as if I were installing Windows from scratch on the SATA drive?

[Meclar]

whoops might help if I enabled the drive in disk management. duh

[Mo]

whoops might help if I enabled the drive in disk management. duh

There you go!

[Soul Sojourner]

SATA is preferable to me, I've weeded out most of my IDE drives at this point, but I still have quite a few laying around and a box full of cables. Some of them new, even. I don't think they'll ever see use.

Looks like you solved your problem. Grats.

[Meclar]

I don't think I'll notice a difference cause I'm only using it as storage but I see a difference after freeing up 10gb on my primary drive plus the other 5-6gb I deleted last week and I'm looking to move my music and photos over too (30gb+).

[Soul Sojourner]

I don't think I'll notice a difference cause I'm only using it as storage but I see a difference after freeing up 10gb on my primary drive plus the other 5-6gb I deleted last week and I'm looking to move my music and photos over too (30gb+).

Why didn't you just buy a bigger HD and use it as the new primary drive and use the old one as back up?

I'm using a 1TB SATA as my primary, a 500GB and 40GB IDE as a backup and alternate OS. I have many other HDD's too, but my motherboard can only handle so many drives, and I don't currently need that many, although I wouldn't mind setting up another system at some point. My wife is using three as well.

[Meclar]

I don't have that much data and I'm looking to buy a laptop in the future so to go nuts on this system isn't necessary and I have no interest in taking the time to switch hard drives.  The motherboard has two SATA connectors and one IDE which two drives can be run off of one cable (CD and one HDD).  When I bought the motherboard I had 4 drives that ran off IDE so I had to eliminate two of them, the floppy and one HDD were left out and I didn't have any SATA drives until now.  I'd really like a huge portable external drive for storage.  Plus any upgrades I make to this will only make it an even better hand-me-down or back up.