Installing 2nd SATA Hard Drive-- PROBLEMS!!

joeyll · Post by **joeyll** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 9:47 am

Hi,

I just bought a new Seagate Barracude SATA 160GB HD. I already have a 300GB SATA hard drive installed on my computer. I have a ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard that has 4 Sata connectors. My main 300gig HD is on number 3 on the sata connectors on the motherboard. I tried installing the new 160 gig hd on number 4 and heres what happened. The computer seemed to want to boot up the new one first it think.....because after I installed I went into the BIOS to see that the new HD was recognized on number 4 sata..which it was...rebooted got to the windows boot up screen and then it automatically reboots which is what it does every time until I took out...or just simply unplugged the new HD from the number 4 sata connector and it boots up just fine from my main drive. Any thoughts or suggestions on what I should do? Should I try moving my old HD from Sata 3 to Sata 1 and putting the new HD on Sata 2? Also, How do I know when I go into the BIOS if my old hard drive is still the Primary one which I want to keep it as the primary one. This second one is just to relieve some space off my old 300 gig drive...which its only about 4 months old anyway...What else should I do or check for in the BIOS if anything..Thanks for any help...

Joey

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800 cpu
1.5 gigs SDRAM
Asus A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard
Dual Nvidia 6800XT Video cards
300 GB Seagate Sata HD

Post by **MidnightSin** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 10:04 am

You need to look in your bios for something like HD Boot Priority, In bios you have told it to boot from your sata HD first and not your cd rom...... now you need to go in and tell it WHICH sata hd to boot from first.

joeyll · Post by **joeyll** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 12:22 pm

Ok..I'll give that a try. Thanks alot man..If it doesnt work maybe you can suggest something else.

Thanks again,

Joey

joeyll · Post by **joeyll** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 5:12 pm

Well, I just found out from talking to Seagate Tech support that if you have the problems I'm having the issue is this...Some motherboards wont support the 3 GB/s transfer rate that the HD i bought is configured for. So the solution is this. You place a 2mm jumper on the far right 2 pins of the 4 pins that are next to the SATA adapter plug- in. I havent done it yet because I had to order the 2mm jumpers so they'll be here hopefully tomorrow. This seems to be a common problem from what Seagate told me and this is the solution. My motherboard, Asus A8N-SLI Premium, even though its almost brand new and a top of the line motherboard just dont support the 3 GB/s transfer rate. Strange but thats the case. If anybody else has this problem you now know the very simple solution. Later dudes,

Joey

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 5:51 pm

Yes. Most SATA2 drives come with that limiter jumper in from the factory. I had to pull it off to get full performance on my system. Surprised the drive didn't come with the jumper.

HOWEVER I think Seagate is wrong in this case. I have an Asus A8N-E Deluxe which is an older mobo than yours and it supports 3Gb/s just fine.

joeyll · Post by **joeyll** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 10:39 pm

Does your motherboard have a Nvidia chipset on it? I thought that my motherboard should support anything as simple as this. Probably the reason the jumper didnt come from factory is this HD was an OEM version. It didnt even have a manual with it. I just looked in my Asus manual and it says it supports up to 3GB/s SATA II drives..so, even though its not working now if it works with the jumper I'll be happy. Maybe I won't be able to see much performance loss in this HD because of the transfer rate loss. If this does not work then I have no clue what my next step would be.

Joey

Joey

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Sep 01, 2006 7:33 am

Yes, it's the same chipset as your mobo. I have the non-SLI Deluxe version which is older. I can't imaging the SLI version wouldn't support 3Gbit if the earlier one does.

joeyll · Post by **joeyll** » Fri Sep 01, 2006 8:02 am

Yeah, I cant either. I guess my Jumper dreams of an easy fix are going down the drain. Heres what the Seagate Tech says about it..One of them anyway:

Hello Joey,

Since the motherboard supports 3.0Gb/s mode, you don't (and shouldn't)
have to jumper for 1.5Gb/s mode. This setting is only for controllers that
only support up to 1.5Gb/s mode, which is not the case here.

Is the BIOS seeing both of your drives when they are connected? You might
also want to try the boot hard drive on port 0, then moving the
ST3160812AS to port 1.

Are you able to then boot with that configuration? I would like for you to
run our Seatools utility against the drive to confirm it is healthy.

Bryce S.
Seagate Technical Support

Joey

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Sep 01, 2006 8:04 am

Have you connected the old drive to SATA1 and the new drive to SATA2 yet? And have you checked the BIOS settings to make sure your boot order is correct? Should be Floppy->CD->SATA1

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Fri Sep 01, 2006 2:50 pm

Also, some in the BIOS of some boards you can select the boot priority of drives, choosing which hard drive is first, and which is second, etc. Look into that.

Post by **MidnightSin** » Fri Sep 01, 2006 5:16 pm

Also check in Bios to see if you have to enable the 3.0 speed controller for some odd reason.