[ObiTwice]

Hello Everybody!

Im a new member here and in need of some friendly advice:

Ive recently bought a new 'maxtor dimondmax plus 10 160gb' sata hardrive.

It came OEM so i though it would be 'plug & play', however this isnt true!

Some how i think luck was on my side when i eventually got the raid sata control driver on my motherboard disk installed and it showed the name of my new hard drive. However i couldn't seem to use it (couldnt see it in mycomputer)!

Browsed the net for a while and came to www.maxtor.com and downloaded
'maxblast 4' Upon running this it recognized my hard drive straight away and asked me if i wanted to set it up (where upon it proceeded to format etc)

Since then ive had a few problems with my pc, whether its dude to the software ive installed of the hard drive...im not sure

problems are:

1st) quicktime buggered up on startup asking for a 'no disk' cancel/try again/continue error

2nd)this moring woke up and found 9 viruses on my baby!! they were all in the 'sun' folder which i think holds most of the java stuff.

I fixed the quicktime error by clearing the recent opened files within the program itself.

and ive deleted the viruses (including one called blackbox.class) and the erntire java folder 'sun'


Now (sorry about the babble) Im thiniking its probably going to be best the fomat my first 40gb maxtor ide hard drive and reinstall windows...

However...i need to know whether or not if i copy all my documents to the new hard drive (sata) and format my old one and reinstall windows on it, will the new hard drive (sata) be formatted when installing it?


Id be very gratefull for any help whatsoever!!!!

Thank you... from the noob!

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Hi

Only one drive will be formatted during the windows install and that is the drive that you specify where you want windows installing during the first part of the setup.

You have two hard disks your 40Gb IDE which i assume windows is currently installed on and your 160Gb SATA. It would be better I think to install Windows on your nice new SATA disk, not only is it a much larger capacity always a bonus in my eyes but the disk itself is quicker than your IDE, processor load on PC's using SATA is much lower too. The bonus of doing this too is that you can keep your 40Gb in the machine as a second hard disk, keep saving all your files and documents there so in the event that windows goes wrong to the point of needing a reinstall in the future you can safely and hassle free install without having to shift two tons of files prior to the install.

Hope this helps

[the_Jackal]

Hi

Only one drive will be formatted during the windows install and that is the drive that you specify where you want windows installing during the first part of the setup.

You have two hard disks your 40Gb IDE which i assume windows is currently installed on and your 160Gb SATA. It would be better I think to install Windows on your nice new SATA disk, not only is it a much larger capacity always a bonus in my eyes but the disk itself is quicker than your IDE, processor load on PC's using SATA is much lower too. The bonus of doing this too is that you can keep your 40Gb in the machine as a second hard disk, keep saving all your files and documents there so in the event that windows goes wrong to the point of needing a reinstall in the future you can safely and hassle free install without having to shift two tons of files prior to the install.

Hope this helps

[ObiTwice]

Hey Jackal!!

thank you very mush for ur advice

maybe u can clear a couple of probs i dont understand...

when i reboot and press tab to get into the sata options, i cant seem to select any of the options.

also, if i try to fomat the new hd and then install windows on it. wont the computer not recognize the sata hard drive until the drivers for it are installed?

for example if i didnt have the ide hard drive and only had a brand new sata hard drive from scratch, how will i get the computer to recognise it and install windows on it with no drivers?

cheers

Obi

Edited by ObiTwice, 18 May 2005 - 06:58 AM.

[the_Jackal]

Not sure about the tab problem i'm afraid?

Leaving the ATA drive out of the equation here and focusing on just the SATA drive during the initial bootup of the install there is an option at the bottom of the screen telling you to press F6 to specify drivers for stuff like raid controllers etc, put the drivers to a floppy and insert the disk when XP start's asking for a location to grab drivers from. The drivers that i needed was on the CD that came with my mobo.
When I first installed my SATA disk I had a nightmare of a time as i wasnt aware of the F6 option that was staring me in the face the whole time and never really realised that XP needed these drivers.
Dont worry about formatting the disk, during the install you can delete the partition, when you have done that re-create the partition and windows will give you the option of doing a full or quick format.

Hope this has helped!

[ObiTwice]

your so helpfull boyo!!!

i dont have a floppy drive so will i be able to grab the drivers from my motherboard disk?

[the_Jackal]

The answer is no I'm afraid, you either need to rob your mates floppy drive for a couple of hours or buy one.

That said you are actually give two options:-

(1) Specify additional drivers
(2) Do not specify additional drivers

You could always try option 2, not goint to swear that will work but it may well do, dont know until you try i guess.