[RESOLVED] Ensuring a SATA drive as slave and IDE HD as master

I have an ASUS a8n-sli motherboard. I have one IDE drive that is the master. I had a 450 gig SATA drive that I wanted to use for a secondary data storage until I found out it was bad. I was trying to see if it would automatically use my IDE as the master and the SATA as the slave though from what I understand by default this would not be the case. I installed the SATA and upon bootup it went through BIOS fine and everything but upon loading windows the Windows XP screen comes up with the little loading bar. but it was very dim and it seems the system locks up. It even got to and goes past the script I put in to choose 'XP standard or safe mode" with the little 30 second countdown at which time it automatically chooses standard bootup. So it did appear to read the IDE as master even though the SATA was hooked up.However now that I know the SATA was bad, maybe it would of defaulted to the SATA before my IDE if it had been a good drive.

My question is, how can I assure that when I grab a new SATA drive the SATA will be the slave and the IDE drive the master?

I am including all relevant BIOS screenshots I can find.

OS Windows XP Home SP3.

The BIOS "boot sequence" will determine which drive is looked at first. The BIOS also looks for bootable information. If the SATA is first and it doesn't find boot info - it'll keep searching other drives.

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Originally Posted by Steve R Jones

The BIOS "boot sequence" will determine which drive is looked at first. The BIOS also looks for bootable information. If the SATA is first and it doesn't find boot info - it'll keep searching other drives.

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ok thank you for that info. Someone told me that the motherboard would default to SATA and i'd have to force it to look at the IDE.

Is there a way I can ensure it doesnt waste time and looks at the IDE drive first?

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The BIOS "boot sequence" will determine which drive is looked at first.

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Might consider looking at the BIOS boot sequence;)

Some BIOSes allow you to explicitly set which drives it boots from first, and with others you just have the generic choice of the HDD. All you can do is have a look and see what options you have.

ok thanks.