Friday, August 29, 2008

How to install a Serial ATA drive in Windows Vista

How can I set up my Serial ATA (SATA) drive in Windows Vista? Windows Vista Installation Basics
Below you will find an outline of the steps for installing a new Serial ATA hard drive with Windows Vista.
If there is already a booting hard drive and this drive will be installed as a non-booting storage drive, .
Install Windows Vista on a Blank SATA Hard Drive
For a more detailed step-by-step tutorial with screenshots, please see this page.
Insert the Windows Vista CD/DVD into the CD/DVD drive.
Power down the computer.
Mount and connect the Serial ATA hard drive. See here for an interactive flash tutorial illustrating this.
Power up the computer.
Choose language and region and then to Install Vista.
When prompted, insert the Serial ATA controller/motherboard drivers if necessary. Do this from a CD, DVD, USB drive, or floppy diskette.
Once the drivers are loaded, proceed with the normal Windows Vista installation.
Install a New (Second) SATA Drive in an Existing Windows Vista System
Confirm the computer is powered off.
Mount and connect the Serial ATA hard drive. See here for an interactive flash tutorial illustrating this.
Boot up the computer to Vista.
Click the Windows Symbol (lower left corner of the desktop).
In the Search bar, type Computer Management (capitalization counts). (Click on image to expand)
If a User Account Control Window pops up, click Continue. (Click on image to expand) ;
In Computer Management choose Disk Management (under storage on the left side). (Click on image to expand)
At this point Vista will usually recognize a blank drive and ask if you want to initialize the drive. If this is a blank drive, you can initialize it. If it is a drive that has data from another computer then you should not initialize it as this will erase that data. (Click on image to expand)
Once initialized, the drive can be formatted. Right-click on the new drive to view the formatting options. The New Simple volume is the default option. Choose the option that best fits your needs. This document will cover the Simple Volume option, since it is suitable for most users. (Click on image to expand)
From here the Simple Volume Wizard will step you through partitioning and formatting the drive. For more information about these options see the Vista help documentation (press F1 to bring up help).
Once you complete the wizard, the drive will be formatted. Once formatting is complete, the drive should show as Healthy with the drive letter you assigned it. After that, you can access the drive as a drive letter (ie, E: or F: or something else) through Windows Explorer. (Click on image to expand)
Jumpers and Cabling Serial ATA interface disk drives are designed for easy installation. It is not necessary to set any jumpers, terminators, or other settings on this drive for proper operation. The jumper block adjacent to the SATA interface connector on SATA 150MB/s drives is for factory use only. The jumper block adjacent to the SATA interface connector on SATA 300MB/s drives can be used to force the drive into SATA 150MB/s mode for use with older SATA controllers that only work with SATA 150MB/s drives.
With a Serial ATA interface, each disk drive has its own cable that connects directly to a Serial ATA host adapter or a Serial ATA port on your motherboard. Unlike Parallel ATA, there is no master-slave relationship between drives that use a Serial ATA interface.
You can use a Serial ATA drive in the same system with Parallel ATA drives as long as both interfaces are supported on the motherboard or with a host adapter. This makes it easy to add Serial ATA compatibility to your existing system without removing existing Parallel ATA disk drives

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