Booting from SATA HDD?

Presently use one 'normal' IDE 40GB HDD and one SATA 80GB HDD. IDE drive is
bootable. Tried booting from SATA disk and gave up. Need more capacity so
upgrade on the way.

What's best/fastest here? (I'm not a games player) - should I get another
SATA drive and struggle with booting problems or just get another 80GB + IDE
drive.

Where would I find authoratative/readable info on booting from SATA disk?

Thanks ...

"Bill" wrote...
Presently use one 'normal' IDE 40GB HDD and one SATA 80GB HDD. IDE drive is
bootable. Tried booting from SATA disk and gave up. Need more capacity so
upgrade on the way.

What's best/fastest here? (I'm not a games player) - should I get another
SATA drive and struggle with booting problems or just get another 80GB + IDE
drive.

Where would I find authoratative/readable info on booting from SATA disk?

All depends on your SATA controller and your MoBo BIOS...

If the combination of the 2 don't directly support booting first from SATA, you
may have to force it by disconnecting/removing the IDE drive, installing the OS
on the SATA, and then reconnecting the IDE drive to transfer your data files.
After that, you remove the OS from the bootable partition of the IDE drive so
there are no future conflicts.

Read your MoBo and controller docs for the best answer.

"Bill" wrote in message
...
Presently use one 'normal' IDE 40GB HDD and one SATA 80GB HDD. IDE drive
is
bootable. Tried booting from SATA disk and gave up. Need more capacity so
upgrade on the way.

What's best/fastest here? (I'm not a games player) - should I get another
SATA drive and struggle with booting problems or just get another 80GB +
IDE
drive.

Where would I find authoratative/readable info on booting from SATA disk?

Thanks ...

AFAIK to boot from SATA drive you have to install SATA driver for the
controller at start of WinXP install by pressing F6 when prompted. Some
motherboards give option for SATA to appear as PATA, which may bypass this
problem.
Mike.

Bill wrote:
Presently use one 'normal' IDE 40GB HDD and one SATA 80GB HDD. IDE
drive is bootable. Tried booting from SATA disk and gave up. Need
more capacity so upgrade on the way.

What's best/fastest here? (I'm not a games player) - should I get
another SATA drive and struggle with booting problems or just get
another 80GB + IDE drive.

Where would I find authoratative/readable info on booting from SATA
disk?
Thanks ...

Your best bet for information would be your motherboard manual. However, its
readability is probably debateable :-)

You will need to make a visit to the BIOS setup (as well as installing a
driver as mentioned by Michael).

John.