Yesterday I Installed a New Maxtor SATA drive in my son's computer (a new MB from ASUS). I also installed a used 40 Gig ATA IDE that I formatted to remove an old XP installation. When I installed XP Pro I made a mistake and picked the C: Partition on the 40 Gig, when I really wanted to install the OS on D: Partition the SATA 160 Gig dirve. (This is my first SATA drive and I thought the SATA would take the boot drive position. I did not read everything I should have prior to this undertaking.)
Now I have some system files on C: the 40 Gig and XP with all of its files on D: the 160 Gig. I am picking up another 160 SATA to install tomorrow. I want to remove the 40 Gig drive.

How would you proceed to remove the 40 Gig and Install the 160 Gig? Would you Format both drives and do a clean new install of Windows XP?

When the Bios gets to the SATA portion, what election would you use? I will have the system, data and programs on one drive and the other drive will contain alternating backups of data, and Auto Recovery System back up files.

I hope I have given enough info to garner an answer. Thanks much for your help... I must get to bed it is after midnight.

I would suggest you start fron scratch !!

Back up your data if you need to and wipe the 160 drive clean and remove any partitions from it that you have.

Install both 160 gig drives take note which drive is connected to which sata connector. This is good for future reference....

The drive on the sata connector 1 will be the boot drive. Set the rig to boot from cd rom in the bios.

Run the xp setup and when you get to the partition and format section create a 20 gig partition this will be your C drive, on the first 160 gig drive on the screen, the rest of the first drive you can partition as you feel like...

Than create a prtition on the second drive any size you wish 1 of 160 gig or split in half, dpends on you...

Select the C drive and install the system , the 20 gig partition will keep the operating system from spreading all over the large disk, this will help in keeping fragmantation to a minimum...

Once the system is loaded jump ino the bios and change the boot order from CD Rom to Hard disk, that way the system will boot driectly from the hard drive....

Hope that is some help to you..

Regards

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Very good...that is the kind of help I needed. With 2 identical SATA drives what is the best way to set up the SATA in the Bios? Is there a downside to mirroring? TIA

After reading about setting up Raid in Bios I have concluded that I should set up a RAID5 and select JBOD for single drives. My intention is to use the second drive as a backup. I assume I should create a 20 Gig Primary partition on each drive for XP or potiential XP install. Install XP only on Drive 0, but have Drive 1 already set up so if it crashes and is deemed unrecoverable, I could just install a new XP on Drive 1 and having the backups there already, I should have minimal down time. Am I doing this right or making this too complicated or how would you guys handle this? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated. TIA

I think you might be getting a tad carried away there !!!!

Good idea but sorry to say raid 5 and Jbod do not work in cinjuction with one another.

Its eather raid 5 or Jbod !!

The probelm you have is that for raid 5 you need 3 hard d rives which a 100% the same..

Not being familiar with your board and if you wanted to go with raid setup you could build a raid 0 or raid 1 array with your 2 160 gig drives..

Raid 0 would give you very high perfomance especialy for video editing etc , but it has a higher risk on data safety, this setup is not fault tolerant...

As for the 20 gig partitions I only refred to a single 20 gig partition on one drive and not both or all of them...

I make the assumption that your board has 2 or more sata connectors, plus a primary and secondary IDE connectors..

To keep things as user friendly as possible I would set things up in the following manner..

2 sata 160 gig drives on the SATA controller.
The 40 gig drive as a slave on the primary ide controler, with the jumper on the 40 gig drive set to slave and connected to the middle connector on the IDE cable.

A cd or DVD rom as master on the primary controller connected to the end conector of the IDE cable.

A DVD or CD burner as a master on the secondary IDE controler conected to the end conector on the IDE cable..

Making sure that all the jumpers on the IDE drives are set correctly...

More info to follow

IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT

A8N-SLI Deluxe
AMD X64 3500+ Wnchst
Corsair 2x512 DDR400 Dual Channel
GV-NX6600128D PCIX Graphics Card
Ggbyte GT Pro CPU Cooler
Zalman VF700-CU VGA Cool

I had a look at your board !!

If you so wish you can set up a raid 0+1 array with your 2 160 gig drives.

This will give you the perofmance of raid 0 and data safety of raid 1..

Meaning raid 0 is stripe mode for very fast data processing etc, and raid 1 will keep a copy of every thing you have on a part of the disk array just in case anything happens with he system, so you would not loose a thing and still be able to boot the computer...

Unless you have played with this before I would suggest you go with the simple setup.

2 160 drives as individual units not raided.

Create a 20 gig partition on the 1st drive ( THE BOOT DRIVE )for the operating system and all programs and drivers which must be loaded on the same partition as the operating system.

Create a second 20 gig partition on the same drive for all large programs such as photoshop, office, and any second party programs etc. But not the anty virus programs or fire walls !!!!

Than create a 3rd partition on the first drive using the balance of the space available approx 120 gig.

Than create one partition on the second drive using all available space, for use as a mass storage drive, for dvd's home movies games etc...

This setup will give a lot of scope with the first sata drive in respect to windows, relaod's etc. By this I mean yoou can delete the C drive and than recreate it or any other partition on the 1st sata drive without having to worry about loosing any data you have stored on the second drive..

My raid drives are partitioned in this exact same manner and it gives me the same flaxibility but with a higher risk should anything go wrong with the raid array..

I hope that has been of some help to you.

Regards

IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT

A8N-SLI Deluxe
AMD X64 3500+ Wnchst
Corsair 2x512 DDR400 Dual Channel
GV-NX6600128D PCIX Graphics Card
Ggbyte GT Pro CPU Cooler
Zalman VF700-CU VGA Cool