# Asus P4P800 SATA drive, stuck in 3rd ide. Will not boot



## 986Jim (Dec 28, 2007)

SO I picked up a new SATA WD 500GB drive for my computer. I have two hard drives in Primary and Secondary IDE now. An old Maxtor 20GB for C and WD 80GB for D.

I'm trying to get the new 500gb drive to be 100gb C and 400gb D and my 80 as E just for back up.

In the bios it shows the SATA as 3rd IDE drive and will not allow me to make it primary or allow me to boot from it. I just can't figure out what I am doing wrong here. Any suggestions?


----------



## emosun (Oct 4, 2006)

Have you installed any operating system on the disk? Can you change the boot order to that drive? Have you tried hitting F8 and selecting the drive from the boot menu?


----------



## linderman (May 20, 2005)

hello :wave:



have you partitioned and formatted this drive ????


is the drive shown in disk managment ????


go to start / right click on my computer / choose "manage" from the upper part of the menu / then click on "disk management" in the left pane of the console / then look in the right hand and lower pane of disk management >>>> what drive letter and is the new drive and is it formatted ???


----------



## 986Jim (Dec 28, 2007)

OK, I got it and since there is so little information on the net about this I will post my fix. I searched with google for quite some time and never really found the answer to this problems but noticed that a lot of other people also had this questions. So to help others with their Asus P4P800 here is how you fix it.

My setup is as follows. ASUS P4P800 mother board and one SATA 500GB and one normal IDE 80GB drive (Pata? I dunno all the terms that well). I want the computer to run from the SATA drive as its faster than my 80gb and keep the 80gb drive only as back up for disc images and backup of my pictures and other things I would really be unhappy if I lost.

So in the bios on my computer my new WD 500gb drive is third IDE and my WD 80GB drive is IDE Master. This is fine and there is no way to change how it shows here anyway.

Goto the Boot screen in the Bios and you will see the following options:
Boot Device Priority
Hard Disc Drives
CDRom Drives

Boot settings Configuration
Security

The two that you really need are Boot Device Priority and Hard Disc Drives.

Select Hard Disc Drives first and pick your new SATA drive as 1st drive and your other drives and second and third or whatever you may have. This will tell the computer that it is to boot from the new SATA drive in Third IDE. You can hook up two SATA drives and in this screen select the Forth IDE drive as the boot if you want, doesn’t make a difference.

In Boot Device Priority I have my DVD drive as first, my new SATA 500gb drive as second and my floppy Drive as Third.

These two setting are what tell the computer what drive to boot from and what order things are to be done it. Once you have this setup you can restart windows and toss in your Windows Setup CD and install windows. It will partition and format the new drive for you all during install so when it reboots all will be set.

I also had to take the extra step of setting my drive letters as my new 500gb drive I partitioned into two drives, 100gb and 400 gb. I boot from the 100gb as C, however my 80gb went into D and the 400gb partition indo E. I changed the drive letters in Administrative Tools to make them what I want. You do this by following this patch Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disc Management then select the disc you want to change the letter of and change it under the Action drop down. There is a lot of info on how to do this with letter by letter instructions out there so I won’t cover it in that much detail.

It really took me a long time to get this figured out as simple as that seems. So hopefully this will help somebody else down the road.

Attached is a "screen shot" of my main Bios screen showing my 80gb as Master IDE and my new 500gb as Third IDE. This is the way it is when they are hooked up this way. And also a shot of the boot screen.

Regards,


----------



## linderman (May 20, 2005)

happy to hear you got your system sorted and thanks for sharing your "fix" :wave:



best regards


joe


----------



## Awadham (Jul 9, 2008)

i have the same problem but my circumstances are diffrent. I tried to format my hard drive by putting in windows xp but the computer didnt read my hard disk. i went into bios and set the boot priority and everyhting and i noticed that my onoly hard drive (80gb) was 3rd ide master and my cd rom was master. I kind of a noob when going about opening up my computer so i require some help. 

Also i reied wot 986Jim told me but i dint see the option 'hard disk drives' instead, i saw cs rom drives. 

Im having major problems with my computer due to viruses so it is really slow. really need to format the computer asap but my computer is not allowing me to. 

Please can anybody help?!


----------



## Pharaohz (May 10, 2008)

Im about ready to install and load an OS on a SATA drive. Did you enter your bios and set the sata to read as an IDE? The bios has no SATA driver so you need to make it read as a IDE. Only after Service pack 2 I think will there be any SATA drivers. After you have installed SP2, then go back into bios and set the Sata correct. Linderman was the one who taught me this if you have any questions, he can answer em.


----------



## linderman (May 20, 2005)

if you suspect any viruses or malware may be present on the drive you want to install an OS on, then you had better download and run KILLDISK (free)


----------



## Isilwen Night (Sep 5, 2008)

I am sorry to post in this old thread..but i have a similar problem.

I just bought a Maxtor 250gb SATA hard drive, and plugged it in.

However, my bios regognizes it as Third IDE Master. 
The problem is that my dvd rom is no longer recognized. If i unplug the hd, my dvd device reappears as Secondary IDE Slave. 

Don't know why. I even moved my dvd device's jumpers to Master, but nothing. I cant install windows without my dvd player.

Anyone knows a solution for this?

Thanks


----------



## emosun (Oct 4, 2006)

Put the maxtor on master then and leave the dvd drive as a slave.


----------



## Isilwen Night (Sep 5, 2008)

Ok, i managed to solve this problem. I moved the jumpers around until my dvd player showed as primary master. 

Now i have another problem though...i don't have the SATA drivers -.-

I cant find them on my mb, which is an ASUS P5GX-MX/1333.

I'm on another pc right now, and i cant find a way to make a floppy disk using the mb's cd


----------

