"First" Hard Drive/ATA100 Screwup in XP Pro Setup

[S.P. Goodman]

Greetings,

I upgraded my wife's 2000 Pro machine to XP Pro last week, and have begun my
journey through this OS's quirks.

First off, the hard drive configuration: The PC has a ATA100 drive that's
the boot drive (WD150, attached to M/B Promise controller) as well as an IDE
drive (WD100, IDE Channel 0, Single Drive/Cable Select).

When I installed 2000 Pro on this set-up, I anticipated the absence of
support for ATA100 (didn't appear until 2000 Pro's SP2) and had my drivers
disk ready. Setup had ignored the boot configuration completely, and went
for the IDE drive D: every bloody time. I had to unplug the IDE drive
completely for the duration of the entire CD install, then plug it in and
eliminate the boot/WINNT configuration Setup had installed on it.

In anticipation of XP Pro I figured that since ATA100 was supported this
would no longer be a problem. Not so!

XP Pro's setup misbehaved in the exact same manner and worse, not only
ignoring the BIOS settings about boot priority, but also re-lettering the
drives to the opposite, C: for the IDE and D: for the ATA100! The only
apparent workaround was to again unplug the IDE drive and do the XP Pro
install on the ATA100 disk, later enduring difficulties install-wise during
upgrades, because the CD drive (alone on IDE Channel 1) was assigned D: and
not E: during the install - and after the IDE drive was replugged in and
resorted it was a while before Setup stopped asking for the CD to be placed
in D:.

Some might offer the excuse that "most PCs with ATA100 drives have just one
HD onboard", but as someone who actually supports these units I can say it's
only the spanking-new PCs that might be like this, ie, not "most" in the
least. What was the bright idea behind XP Setup ignoring what the BIOS says
about boot priority? Obviously no workaround is needed as the setup and
cleanup have been done, but equally obvious is that someone dropped the ball
in the programming-setup dept. about this particularly crucial point. Any
thoughts on this one?

Thanks

 

[johnf]

If you meant by "ATA100 drive", a S-ATA setup, I think you'll find it's how
the MOBO sees it, not XP.
I have two drives, a S-ATA & a conventional IDE drive, both Cable Select,
which show up in Explorer as C & D respectively.
If I check the configuration with Partition Magic, it sees the IDE as Disk1
& the S_ATA as Disk2, irrespective of of the BIOS is configured.
All this is with a "spanking-new PC" & an ASUS P4P400-E Deluxe MOBO.

 

[Guest]

For the Microsoft position on SATA look at:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/serialATA_FAQ.mspx

If you meant by "ATA100 drive", a S-ATA setup, I think you'll find it's how
the MOBO sees it, not XP.
I have two drives, a S-ATA & a conventional IDE drive, both Cable Select,
which show up in Explorer as C & D respectively.
If I check the configuration with Partition Magic, it sees the IDE as Disk1
& the S_ATA as Disk2, irrespective of of the BIOS is configured.
All this is with a "spanking-new PC" & an ASUS P4P400-E Deluxe MOBO.

 

[S.P. Goodman]

If you meant by "ATA100 drive", a S-ATA setup, I think you'll find it's how
the MOBO sees it, not XP.

Not S-ATA. ATA-100 with a ribbon cable. It's the primary boot device via
the BIOS before the IDE drive.

I have two drives, a S-ATA & a conventional IDE drive, both Cable Select,
which show up in Explorer as C & D respectively.

If I check the configuration with Partition Magic, it sees the IDE as Disk1
& the S_ATA as Disk2, irrespective of of the BIOS is configured.
All this is with a "spanking-new PC" & an ASUS P4P400-E Deluxe MOBO.

The boot.ini defines the ATA-100 as disk(0).