XP and SATA drive assignments

[Timboi]

Hi,

How does XP assign SATA drives?

I'm having unepxected results when trying to image a SATA HDD. I configure
XP on a SATA HDD connected to SATA0. I then attach another HDD to SATA1 (or
another SATA channel). I would expect the orignal drive to be assigned disk0
in XP disk manager but no, it decideds that the secondary drive will be
drive0 and the drive in SATA0 will actually be drive1.
Why is this? It makes it very difficult to predict which drive will be
which, when trying to clone drives.
It makes no sense to me, which is why I'masking this question. At least with
IDE, you knew which drive would be set as the first drive. Isn't SATA
supposed to make life easier (without the need to use jumpers and worry about
IDE channels)?

Cheers,

Tim

 

[Rocky]

Surely you set things up in the bios setup first.

 

[Timboi]

Rocky - set what up in the BIOS?

As far as I can tell, there's no area of the BIOS to tell the computer which
SATA channel is to be read first. Even if there was, why would SATA1 take
precedence over SATA0 as 'the first drive' by default?

Cheers,

Tim

 

[Andy]

It's dependent on the design of the motherboard. What motherboard do
you have?

 

[Andrew E.]

What are trying to do with the hds,create a RAID set,or simply run 2
SATA hds from the controller.If RAID is the option (cloning) takes place thru
the windows set-up or installation of the OS,if & only if youve chose RAID 1
disk array.RAID 0 really doesnt clone as 1 does.If simply running 2 hds,youre
SATA plug in determines a number,windows gives it a letter,if say 0 is
asigned
D: & 1 is E:,& you dont like that,open device mgr,uninstall one,close out
device,
go to run,type:diskmgmt.msc In msc,L.click on the solo SATA hd,go to
actions,
all,change drive letter/path,change it to the other letter which is now
available,
close out restart pc.

 

[sgopus]

look over your manual for your motherboard and see if they have assigned port
numbers to each sata port, this may the reason.
if a drive is labeled by letters it shouldn't matter.
I have only one sata drive, so I haven't experienced this issue.
but then I have my drives custom named so I don't even look at the number
designators

 

[Timboi]

Andrew,

I'm just trying to clone the orignal HDD (disk to disk clone). I'm not using
RAID at all. I've setup the first disk, installed the apps and want to use
this as an image for other computers.
What I expcted was that when adding the 2nd HDD to the computer is that it
should be indentified as the 2nd disk but it's being identified as the first
disk (at least by Windows).
I'm not bothered about drive letters - I'm just wanting to clone the
original drive. The reason I'm concerned about the way Windows assigns
letters is because I'm using a modified BartPE with Ghost to clone (which
uses XPE). I discovered the problem initially when Ghosted the image (disk to
disk clone) from disk 1 to disk 2 and found the wrong disk had been used as
the source.
I just don't understand why the disk on SATA0 is not being recongnised as
the the first disk and why SATA4 IS being recognised as the first disk.

Cheers,

Tim

 

[Timothy Daniels]

...I'm using a modified BartPE with Ghost to clone (which
uses XPE).

Care to explain how you did that? I'm thinking of putting
Casper 5.0 on BartPE.

*TimDaniels*

 

[MAP]

Hi,

How does XP assign SATA drives?

I'm having unepxected results when trying to image a SATA HDD. I
configure XP on a SATA HDD connected to SATA0. I then attach another
HDD to SATA1 (or another SATA channel). I would expect the orignal
drive to be assigned disk0 in XP disk manager but no, it decideds
that the secondary drive will be drive0 and the drive in SATA0 will
actually be drive1.
Why is this? It makes it very difficult to predict which drive will be
which, when trying to clone drives.
It makes no sense to me, which is why I'masking this question. At
least with IDE, you knew which drive would be set as the first drive.
Isn't SATA supposed to make life easier (without the need to use
jumpers and worry about IDE channels)?

Cheers,

Tim

Hi Tim,
I'm about to do this very thing, according to the hand book that came
with my Dell, under adding a second HD it says to remove my boot HD from the
upper slot and install it into the lower slot, next install the new drive
into the slot the boot HD just came from (it didn't mention moving the SATA
connections but what would be the point if you didn't).
This didn't make any since to me, but now that I read your post their must
be something to it.