Storage Solutions A HDD problem for Hardware Guru's

[Eazy]

I have not been able to understand the way the MoBo manufacturers mark the sequence of the Sata Connectors in the BIOS and on the MoBo and they way Window's Disk Management actually shows them.

The picture below shows a screenie of the way Gigabyte shows the Sata port numbers on the MoBo and in the Manual - but the way XP's Disk Management lists the HDDs is as per the colors I have marked...

A HDD attached to RED is shown in Disk Management as the First HDD

A HDD attached to Brown is shown in Disk Management as the Second HDD

A HDD attached to Yellow is shown in Disk Management as the third HDD

HDDs attached to the ports with no colours are shown by Disk Managemnt to be the 4th 5th and 6th HDD.

I am sure you are as confused about this as I am hyeah:

 

[Switch]

Yup its weired. I too noticed the same. But in DOS it works just fine

 

[The Sauron]

It seems diagonal arrangement as..

SATA2_1========1
SATA2_4========2

SATA2_0========3
SATA2_5========4

SATA2_2========5
SATA2_3========6

 

[SunnyBoi]

Same with my DFI NF4. Two ports work fine in windows, third drive is not detected. Detects fine in windows, even partitioned it in partition manager thru live cd :S

 

[Switch]

I dont think it works like that. IMO windows no's the disc in the FIFO manner. First disc installed gets NO.1 Status. It doesnt matter what port its on. Also during a fresh install of windows the Disc's are shown in the way they are physically connected.

 

[Eazy]

But in DOS it works just fine

IN DOS !!! who uses DOS anymore hyeah: .... and DOS does not even see any of my large NTFS file system HDDs.

The reason I was looking to make sense out of this was that even Acronis True Image makes the same mess of the HDDs listings as Disk Management, and that makes for some bad (read funny) backup situations, as I have to look carefully which HDD is being backed up and restored - I once mirrored a blank HDD to the one which had the data, instead of the other way around (THAT WAS NOT FUNNY)

 

[Eazy]

It seems diagonal arrangement as..

SATA2_1========1
SATA2_4========2

SATA2_0========3
SATA2_5========4

SATA2_2========5
SATA2_3========6

I think you have succeeded in making me even more confused !! :huh:

Why would anyone want to do this - could the MoBo makers and Microsoft not have sorted this out between themselves

 

[madnav]

bios will list devices as per the connector number on the mobo.

bt windows lists drives as per the priority settings made in bios.

ur bios is either configuring drives in that way... OR generally what happens is the bios adapts the device priority as per the time it was connected...

suppose only 1 drive was connected at the time of OS installation..then that dive(n port) becomes primary in bios automatically... drives added later seem to be at lower priority unless reconfigured.

 

[obama]

The method of disk enumeration (disk object number) in XP is different than the one in bios.
it is basically the I/O manager and Disk Class Driver which assigns the disk object number in the object manager's database. This data is obtained from the bios via NTDETECT.COM by the NTLDR.

Perhaps ur current HDD 2 (Brown one , attached to SATA 6 has a more valid or proper signature than the HDD 3. (mind you, this is just one of the possibilities)

Whats the partition structure of the 2nd and 3rd Disks?

Do any of them have boot.ini file or other boot signature?

Have you frequently changed / swapped the drives in ur pc (meaning attaching them to different SATA connectors) after they have been previously recognised / enumerated by XP and by it (XP) alloting them a Drive letter ?

I am no expert in such matters just asking out of curosity.....

 

[Naga]

Same here on my 790i. 4 drives installed at the same time, 2 in RAID0/1 each.

RAID0 (SATA 1+2) shows up as Disk1 while RAID1 (SATA 3+4) is DISK 0 in Vista. I obviously prepared RAID0 first to install Vista.

 

[6pack]

i've also seen that windows gives preference to drives that have been marked as active partitions. eg: 1st hdd has 2 drives - c and d, c is active, d is not. 2nd hdd has 2 drives f and g, f active, g not active.

windows will order the drives as c, f, d, g. and not c, d, f, g.

if all drives are active, then the order will be alphabetically.

 

[Eazy]

^^^ Answers to all points raised by the posters....

I have 3 HDDs each with 3 Partitions and each has been formatted and the OS installed when each of the HDDs are the only one attached (I never format or install OS on a HDD with other drives present). Each HDD has the first partition marked Active, so I can have any one HDD attached and run the OS on its own. The point of the HDDs being detected according to the time they were formatted and OS installed does not seem right - BECAUSE - today I bought a new HDD and restored a backup image of the OS and it behaves the same way as the old HDD it has replaced. YES I play musical chairs with my HDDs and NO it does not matter which HDD is present in the setup - each SATA Header seems to have a set priority by the MoBo and that is different as seen by Microsoft.

Here 2 Pictures to illustrate my point

BIOS -

XP's Disk Management shows -

BIOS setup shows HDDs attached order -
1 640
2 750
3 1TB

XP's Disk management shows order as -
1 750
2 1TB
3 640

Once again the image of the SATA headers being used...

RED = 750
Orange = 1TB
Yellow = 640

The 750GB HDD is my main OS HDD and I always try to have it as my first HDD as seen by the OS and Acronis True Image. The 1TB is my Second most important HDD and so I want it to show as the second HDD in Disk Management and Acronis True Image.

Whats with the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R MoBo's BIOS showing Master and Slave SATA HDDs, I thought there was no Masters and Slaves SATAs :huh:

 

[cranky]

You have to separate Windows and BIOS. One is software the other the hardware. Fundamentally Windows will number the disks in the order that it finds them, and this may change when you start Drive Manager after a reboot depending on which order the disks were detected in.

As long as your drive letters remain the same, you shouldn't have to worry. You obviously have to remember which drive had which drive letter, so you can effectively manage disks and partitions on identical disks in Drive Management.

Fundamentally, the IDE system is based on Master and Slave channels. SATA removes the slave device connection, but the logic still needs to detect the 'slave'. If you open up Device Manager, for example, you can see the unused channels which you can't use anyway, all disk controllers have a 'Master' and a 'Slave' but obviously for SATA connections you can only use the Master. Some BIOS revisions will show them up, and some will not. Luck of the draw.

As for your connections, the 640GB is the first physical drive (Drive 0), the 750 the second and the 1TB the third. However Windows starts enumerating drives after the boot drive, so the 750GB and 1TB get numbered correctly. The 640GB is on the first physical connection but Windows has to seek through all other connections first, so it shows that up as the last drive.

Which is what you want anyway, so where's the problem?

 

[blr_p]

Whats with the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R MoBo's BIOS showing Master and Slave SATA HDDs, I thought there was no Masters and Slaves SATAs :huh:

That had me stumped as well :ashamed:

But i guess they decided to go cheap with the code.

 

[zhopudey]

As long as your drive letters remain the same, you shouldn't have to worry. You obviously have to remember which drive had which drive letter, so you can effectively manage disks and partitions on identical disks in Drive Management.

Which is why I've stopped being innovative with labels Last time I had 2 WD 500s, I named the partitions WDA1, WDA2, WDB1 etc. Even wrote A, B on the drives with a marker hyeah:

 

[blr_p]

I just label the volumes (using the OS) like this
C-DRIVE, D-DRIVE etc

Then after i add the backup drive, check in partition manager to make sure i'm backing up the 'correct' pair of drives. The backup usually gets allocated some higher letter, if the volume names match then its all good.