sata port order on mobo

[cyberman45]

Am running Win XP Pro SP3 with a Gigabyte GA-P43-ES3G mobo

My system drive "C" is a sata drive. It is currently connected to sata port zero on the mobo... and I have a 1TB WD external HDD connected to sata port one.

If I  reverse these two connections...  will it cause problems...  will my PC still boot?

I'm considering the switch because the way it is now, XP plug and pray is enumerating the external drive as drive zero and the system drive as drive 1 and it's taking an extra minute or so to boot up as if it's expecting to find the OS on the external drive.

Thanks for any replies

[dmdilks]

It does matter where you have your hard drives plug into. As long as you have the hard drive with the OS on it booting first in the Hard Disk boot priority.

Go into the standard cmos features. In there it will show you which one is master and slave. If both are master change your 1tb to see it as a slave.

I have a computer with 4 OS on it. XP, Vista, Win 7 & Win 8. The XP is the Slowest of all the OS to boot too. Hard Disk boot priority is in the The Advanced Bios Features. 

[cyberman45]

Hello DM...

Thanks for your reply...   My Gigabyte mobo has Award Bios...

and it shows my system drive as channel 0  master

my WD 1 TB is on channel 3 which is master only...

and my CD rom drive  is in channel 4 master...

What's your recommendation as to which slave slot I should use for the WD  1TB... slave 0 , 1 or 4 ??   channels 2 and 3 are master only

Thanks again, I appreciate your help!!

p.s. forgot to mention that in addition to my system drive which of course is drive C... and the WD which is drive F...  I also have two internal sata drives  which are raid 0 and they are hooked to a raid controller card in a PCI slot so they don't show up on an IDE channel in bios and they are drive D

[dmdilks]

Like I said before it doesn't really matter where the drive are connected too.

The problem is you how you have the drives connected to the computer that it will take longer for the computer to boot.

The thing is the bottle neck is the controller card in the pci slot & XP. How I would hookup my drives are OS-0, TB-1, DVD/rw-2.

You still have 3,4,& 5 open why are you using a controller card. Sata ports are 0-1, 2-3, 4-5 on the board and the ones closest to the edge of the board are usually master. But not all the time.

Plus when you which your drives around you will have to make sure you are booting to the OS drive first. To check that again go into Hard Disk boot priority is in the The Advanced Bios Features.

[cyberman45]

I should have provided a little more info... 

My PC was built for me by Full Compass.  I use it for voice over work and therefore often deal with large audio files...  that's why they set up the two raid drives on the pci card for storing... and having quicker access to... those big files.

When my WD external drive is not hooked up to the computer... it boots up quickly.   
When my WD external is connected via usb  it still boots up quickly
But when the WD is connected via esata and an esata to sata adapter the boot up takes an addtional minute to complete.  I have a 1 meter (3.3 foot) esata cable connected to an adapter in the tower... the adapter has 18" cables... so I'm under the 2 meter limitation for esata. 

(note:  There's a strobing light on the front of the WD drive which goes up and down when the drive is being accessed)

With the WD connected via esata, the PC goes through POST... and then the Win XP logo comes on the screen... and then the screen goes black.
When connected via esata the light on the WD strobes about 50 times and then the computer finally boots up.  It's almost like it's searching the WD for an OS.  I prefer sata over usb because transfer rate is MUCH higher. (hope you don't think I'm making too big a deal out of an extra minute for boot... but I shut down my compter at night and power it up during the day each day... so the longer boot process is a pain!!)

My system C drive is first in BOOT Priority... raid is second... and WD is third.

Another curious thing... twice I have moved the sata cable for the WD to a different port... and the problem goes away for several boot ups... but eventually it comes back.

In the standard CMOS setting in BIOS, all channels are set to AUTO detect.  I wanted to use the MANUAL option to move the WD to a slave slot but there does not seem to be any way to type in the Name of the drive  in the slot.  If you could shed any light on how to do this that would be great.

Thanks again for your help!!

[dmdilks]

Here are a few things to try. 1- If you have plug and play disable that. 2 - Disable HHD Smart Capability. 3 - disable the Halt on.

On naming the hard drive I think you have to do that in windows. I don't think you can do in the bios.