hi there
well my problem is a little tricky but i will try to describe it as best as i can..

i just got my new VGA card installed (ATI HD 4890 TOXIC) and its a pretty big card so it covered all my s-ata sockets on the mother board and i had only 1 sata socket left and available for use..

i wanted to hock up 2 Sata drivers and a CD room so i needed extra sata sockets so i went a head and bought an On-board IDE/sata convertor which converts my IDE socket into 2 sata sockets..

i had Vista 64 installed but i had some trouble with online gaming on it so i tried to dual boot xp with it on the other Sata driver but i had many problems with my boot setting and i lost my xp system!

so here's the question...how can i connect the 2 Sata HD drivers so that i can install each operating system separately on each one and then dual them together..does this convert affects the slave/master settings as it was originally IDE socket?


mainly..-if u lost me on the explanation and u guys will probably will as it's complicated -..i want to dual boot vista64/ xp64 with vista 64 already on one hard drive and the other is still blank (just partitioned) with the 2 already mentioned hard drives and the sockets that i have available..


thnx

P.S: i didn't know which section to post this but i went a head and put it here so move me if i am wrong

That device you bought, 2 sata from 1 IDE connector ? Never heard of it. I think you are on your own on that one - sorry.

When installing XP and Vista, they should be installed in the order XP first, then Vista. you need to take the advanced install option with Vista, or it will simply over-write XP. Also XP and Vista have completely different boot methodologies, and Vista, unless you alert the Vista install to the need to dual boot, completely destoys the original XP one (which is why you 'lost' it - it is still there but inaccessible from boot). You can find out about this dual-boot problem of xp versus Vista easily enough.

You could have one Sata on the proper channel, and the other Sata on the ide-extended-to-Sata, but that would probably require a bios change of boot channel every time you wished to boot to the other channel (at any rate my PC is like that - when I had Win7 on a second IDE channel I could not readily dual boot with other OS's on the SATA channel).

As to what should happen if you keep both SATA's on one IDE channel is a matter of what on earth your bios makes of it. Have a look and let us know.

Dual boot generally expects to simply start one of several Partitions on one drive, not single partitions on several drives, and you may do better to work on that assumption. I.e. make sure you know which of your two Sata drives comes first, then sub-divide it into to separate partitions and install XP first on one, then Vista on the second.

If you think you can keep you existing and working (??) vista install, and install XP later, I would advise you will need great expertise - it can be done, but it is hard, and the setup you have with Sata-on-ide will almost certainly make it a harder sort of hard. In fact, I hardly think sata-on-ide will be stable, and probably also a lot slower than sata alone.

well thnx...u mentioned av lot of technicalities in ur reply and i am a bit noobish when it comes to that so ...i just fully understood the first line and that's it ..i needed the help on the IDE to sata thingy and u said u couldn't help on that part so thnx for ur effort in the rest

i will try to dual them following a tutorial of dual booting with vista ultimate 64 installed first..

will let u guys know

thnx anyawy :

I have a similar situation, 3 drives, 2 on XP (FS9 and XP lables), then I just loaded W7 on the 3rd drive, used the custom setting if I remember, ( disconnected the XP drives during the loading process), when finished the W7 comes up fine, but I have no choice to select which OS during the boot up screens............do I change the BIOS to make this work?? Is there a step by step article somewhere to read,,, Super thanks!!! B42L8

Google EasyBCD, that will get you fixed up.