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Re: [LUG] Upgrading Missus' Hard drive

 

On Monday 05 October 2009, Gordon Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Oct 2009, george parker wrote:
> > On Sunday 04 October 2009, Rob Beard wrote:
> >> Henry Bremridge wrote:
> >>> Running ubuntu, she has an Hitachi IDE ATA hard-drive (160GB) and needs
> >>> some more space..
> >>>
> >>> In googling:
> >>> - SATA disks seem to be larger for the same price than than ATA disks
> >>> - SATA disks require
> >>>   - An appropriate motherboard
> >>>   - Or an ATA PCI Card (£30 from Maplin, £16 from Dabs, £5 from Amazon)
> >>>   - Or an SATA to ATA connector
> >>>
> >>> Then I saw this
> >>>
> >>> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Port-Expansion-VIA-VT6421a-chipset/dp/B000S87GG
> >>>0 4 Port SATA PCI Expansion Card &IDE VIA VT6421a chipset (3 Sata plus
> >>> IDE) for £10
> >>>
> >>> Which I figured I could plug into a spare slot, and add the new SATA
> >>> drive
> >>>
> >>> Question
> >>>
> >>> 1/ Has anyone used one of these things before, can anyone see any
> >>> problems?
> >>
> >> Not used a PCI SATA card myself before but being a VIA chipset I'd say
> >> it should be fairly well supported.
> >>
> >>> 2/ Any opinions on having SATA and IDE in one ubuntu machine?
> >
> > I bought a new Asus mother board and SATA drive recently.  After getting
> > it all up and running I plugged in a PATA drive to transfer stuff from my
> > old Home directory.  The mobo recognised both drives but insisted on
> > trying to boot from the PATA drive.  I fiddled with the bios but as far
> > as it was concerned if you have a pata drive fitted, it ignores any SATA
> > drives.  There are 3 options to boot sequence; removeable device, CD rom
> > and hard drive. The hard drive is selected by the BIOS and it selects
> > pata if one is fitted. There may be a way around this but I fitted the
> > pata drive to another machine to get the info off.
>
> There's usually a 2nd option to let you select which hard drive to boot
> from. Sometimes you need to set it, save the config, then reset the
> computer rather than just exiting the BIOS though. I've built many Asus
> based systems over the years like this.
>
> Gordon

You are indeed, as ever, correct Gordon.  Thankyou. There is an option to 
select hard drive priority which I missed.  More haste less speed as they 
say.  I like the Asus mobo overall.  As I've said before, I had real problems 
getting it's intel based audio to work, but did in the end and it only had 1 
ps2 socket for either mouse or keyboard.  I had to buy a USB mouse.  My fault 
for not reading the spec close enough.  I think maybe 2 glasses of wine 
should be the cut off point when placing orders.

George

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