Guide to SATA hard drive setup [an article useful to friends who use SATA]

This is my three articles on how to use SATA hard disk settings published in the PC newspaper. I saw some people in the report saying that they had sorted the articles and posted them on the forum for convenience, so they sent them here. Hope you can help your friends who encounter problems.

Q & A on SATA hard drive (PC Report: 04-33) bigh

As the prices of SATA hard disks from various manufacturers continue to decline, the Main Boards supporting SATA gradually become prosperous and mature. More and more people Choose SATA hard disks to build their own computer platforms. However, because the SATA hard disk is different from the parallel port PATA hard disk, there will be many differences in installation and use, and many users will encounter a lot of trouble after purchasing it. This article will explain some common problems in the form of Q &:
1. Q: I heard that the data cable and power cord interface of the SATA hard disk are different from those of the PATA hard disk. Do I need to purchase an additional SATA hard disk?
A: Generally, a dedicated 7-core data cable and power cord are attached to the motherboard that supports SATA hard disks. The new power supply also provides power supply interfaces for dedicated SATA devices. In addition, some SATA hard disks are equipped with a D-type power interface used by the original PATA hard disk, which can be compatible with the old power supply. Therefore, we usually do not need to purchase additional resources. If you do need it, the SATA data cable costs about 10 yuan, and the power supply interface wiring costs 10 yuan. The computer market is selling and the quality is acceptable.

2. Q: Do I have to attach an extra driver to the SATA hard disk to find the hard disk?
A: Not all. It depends on the situation.
When the DOS/Win98/winme system is installed, the SATA hard disk does not need to be loaded with any drivers, and can be used like the PATA hard disk.
When Windows 2003/XP/is installed, the main board is generally composed of a nanqiao chip (such as Intel's ich5/R, and via's vt8237) when the SATA controller is not built or the raid function is blocked in BIOS settings, you do not need to load the driver to find the hard disk. When raid is enabled, You need to load the driver. The SATA controller using a third-party chip must load the driver.
For detailed steps to load the SATA driver, see the article "when the Serial ATA Hard Disk encounters WindowsXP", as follows:

With the narrowing of the price gap between Serial ATA Hard Drive (SATA hard drive or serial hard drive) and general IDE hard drive, as well as the increasing number of SATA hard drive boards (such as kt600, i865p/PE, and i875p), many people choose SATA hard disks when installing the device. However, many of my friends have reported that it is difficult to install Windows XP on SATA hard disks. I recently installed a kt600 + Seagate SATA hard drive computer to my friend. I found that there was a problem when installing Windows XP, And it would prompt that the hard drive could not be found. I have summarized the installation experience. You only need to pay attention to three points to install Windows XP on your SATA hard disk.

1. because Windows XP does not directly support Serial ATA controllers, you must search for a third-party SATA driver from the soft drive when installing Windows XP, the drive on the CD must be copied to the floppy disk. Therefore, you must first have a soft drive. If you want to install Windows 98, you only need to select SCSI/SATA as the Boot Mode in the BIOS.

2. When you first install Windows XP to find a SCSI device, press the F6 key (a text prompt is displayed below the screen) to load the Third-Party driver. However, please note that the prompt will only take about 2 seconds for you to press the button. If you miss it, you have to restart it again. After you press F6, wait a moment and the system prompts you to press the s key. The system will automatically search for the driver in the soft drive and select the appropriate driver in the drive floppy disk provided by the motherboard. Then it will show that the selected driver has been loaded, press enter to continue, the following is the normal WindowsXP installation steps.

Note: Some motherboard (such as giant KT600-R) provided by the drive floppy disk, its inf file is placed in the folder, need to copy it to the root directory of the floppy disk to be automatically searched.

3. if your motherboard is loaded with silicon image SATA raid, you may need to install the SATA raid driver again after Windows XP is installed. For this reason, the requirements for different boards are slightly different, the main board specification will provide detailed instructions. Please pay more attention to this. For example, the giant KT600-R, after the system is started, other devices in the Hardware Device Manager will display a yellow question mark RAID device and need to re-install the driver for it. Enter the disk or disc provided by the motherboard to allow the system to automatically search. If you are prompted that the file cannot be searched, manually specify the INF file.

Note: like Windows XP, Windows does not have a Serial ATA controller driver. The installation method is basically the same as that of Windows XP.

I hope that my experience will allow my friends who encounter this problem to take less detours, so that Windows XP can smoothly settle down on the SATA hard drive.

3. Q: What if the SATA driver is not equipped with a soft drive?
A: At this stage, when the Win2000/XP system installs a CD to load an additional device driver, it only reads the soft drive.
Although, we can build a system installation disc that integrates the required SATA control driver to save the trouble of loading data from the soft drive. However, its production project and settings are complex and require a deep understanding of how to load drivers and SATA driver files on Windows systems, in addition, a slight error in the settings will cause the driver loading to fail. Therefore, it is recommended to spend 70 yuan to buy a software drive, saving you trouble.
For how to integrate the SATA driver, refer to "marry" Windows XP. As follows:

In order not to let the installation process of WINXP need to be loaded with a floppy disk, many people dream of integrating the SATA driver of the motherboard into the installation disc, in this article, I will DIY a Windows XP installation disc that integrates the SATA driver!

Windows XP installation directory and file preparation

Open the resource manager and have enough disk space (the free space is at least 700 mb). If you put the generated CD image in this partition, make sure that there is a disk with double capacity, that is, around GB) to create a folder on the hard disk partition, such as "D:/xpsata", to save all the installation files for Windows XP.

Put a good Windows XP installation CD into the optical drive, select all the files on the CD in the resource manager, and then copy them to the "D:/xpsata" directory.

Prepare driver files

Generally, the SATA driver is included in the driver installation disc attached to the motherboard. Open the CD directory and find a folder with "SATA" or "raid" characters in the name. You can also download the file from the motherboard manufacturer's website or other driver sites (for example: driver home "http://www.mydrivers.com", etc.) to find their own Motherboard chipset matching SATA driver.

Create a new directory (such as statdrv) in disk D, and copy all the SATA driver files to this directory (D:/satadrv ). Here we will introduce the SATA driver of si3112 as an example. The integration steps for other types of SATA drivers are almost identical, except that the driver file names are different.

In the "D:/statdrv" folder, there must be a file with the extension ". INF "or". small OEM files, such as oemsetup. INF or txtsetup. OEM (in this example, "txtsetup. OEM), open it with the Notepad program, and then use it!

Edit the "txtsetup. Sif" File

Open the "D:/xpsata/i386" folder and find a file named "txtsetup. sif file, which is the information file for Windows XP to load the driver during installation, open it with a Notepad program.

Press the "Ctrl + F" shortcut key to open the Search dialog box and search with the keyword "[sourcedisksfiles. After this field is found, some content already exists below it. Flip to the end of this field (Note: it is not the end of the entire file) and add the following content: "2017112.sys = 1, 3 _, 4, 1 ".

Here, "2017112.sys = 1, 3 _, 4, 1" is the code that describes the location of the driver. The code format is "filename_on_source = diskid, subdir, upgradecode, newinstallcode, spare, spare, newfilename", in "txtsetup. the "[sourcedisksnames]" and "[winntdirectories]" fields in the SIF file are described in detail. If you are interested, you can study the correspondence between other directories in depth. Here is a brief introduction.

In actual operations, the Code cannot be copied! In particular, the file "ipv112.sys" with the extension sys is the driver file name in the SATA driver directory "D:/statdrv". If your SATA driver is different from the one described in this article, you only need to replace it with the corresponding file in the directory.

Switch to the "txtsetup. OEM" file that was opened earlier and search with the keyword "[hardwareids.". You can find fields similar to "[hardwareids. sics. si3112.

Code under this field, for example, "id =" PCI/ven_1095 & dev_3112 & subsys_31121095 "," si3112 "".

Switch to the opened "txtsetup. Sif" file window and search with the keyword "[hardwareidsdatabase. After finding it, set "txtsetup. [hardwareids. sics. copy the code in the si3112_xp] field to "txtsetup. the end of the "[hardwareidsdatabase]" Field of the SIF file. However, we need to change the code format, for example, "id =" PCI/ven_1095 & Dev _ 3112 & subsys_31121095 "," si3112 "": "PCI/ven_1095 & dev_3112 & subsys_31121095 =" si3112 "" (other codes are modified in the same way). The changed code is as follows:

PCI/ven_1095 & dev_3112 & subsys_31121095 = "si3112"
PCI/ven_1095 & dev_3112 & subsys_34238086 = "si3112"
PCI/ven_1095 & dev_3112 & subsys_31_15d9 = "si3112"
PCI/ven_1095 & dev_3112 & subsys_b0021458 = "si3112"
PCI/ven_1095 & dev_3112 & subsys_01661028 = "si3112"
PCI/ven_1095 & dev_3112 & subsys_82141033 = "si3112"
PCI/ven_1095 & dev_3512 & subsys_35121095 = "si3112"
PCI/ven_1095 & dev_3512 & subsys_01661028 = "si3112"

Prompt
The Code content of different SATA drivers varies with each other and should be flexibly handled according to the specific situation.

Check whether the modified copy content is the same as the original one. If yes, delete the duplicate row. Search for the "[SCSI. Load]" and "[SCSI]" fields in the "txtsetup. Sif" file and add the following content:

[SCSI. Load]
Si3112 = 2017112.sys, 4

[SCSI]
Si3112 = "Silicon image ⅱ 3112 satalink controller"

So far, we have added the relevant information of our SATA driver to the Windows XP installation information file "txtsetup. Sif!

The steps for adding custom SATA information above seem complicated. In fact, you can also open "txtsetup. sif "file and driver directory". INF "or". "OEM" information file, and then the content under the relevant fields in the latter file is transplanted to "txtsetup. sif file. Knowing the method makes it easier to do it!

Modify the content of the "winnt. Sif" File

Now we have completed two most important steps: first, we have obtained the SATA driver files, which are now saved in the "D:/statdrv" folder; the second is to modify the information file "txtsetup. sif ". But now there is a new question: How does Windows XP know under which directory the driver file is required during installation?

To solve this problem, modify the "winnt. Sif" file. This file is an additional information file for Windows XP system installation. You can specify the installation path of Third-Party drivers not provided by Microsoft.

In this example, create a text file in notepad in the "D:/xpstat/i386" folder, write the content, and change the file name to "winnt. Sif.

Prompt
When saving a file in notepad, you must enter the complete file name, and use double quotation marks to cause the file name, such as "winnt. sif "then, the token generated on the negative side is still a local file (winnt.sif.txt), which will cause errors during installation and the stat driver cannot be loaded automatically!

Add the following content to the "winnt. Sif" file (if some content already exists, modify or add it, and ensure that the content in each line is not repeated ):

[Unattended]
Oempreinstall = Yes
Oempnpdriverspath = "statdrv"

The content in the last quote of the above Code refers to the relative path of the driver to the root directory of the CD when the CD is subsequently generated. Because we intend to put the D:/statdrv folder for saving the driver to the root directory of the new installation CD, we do not need to include any subdirectory path.

Compress the SATA driver to the Installation File

Use tools that support the cab file format (such as WinRAR) to add files with the Sys extension in the driver directory to the cab file in the windxp installation directory.

Here we can use the command line tool named makecab.exe attached to Windows XP, which is located in the "C:/Windows/system32/" directory. Because "System32" is the default search path, you do not need to use the path of the program.

Open the run dialog box in the Start menu and enter the following command: "makecab D:/statdrv/g0112.sys D:/XP-STAT/i386/g0112.sy _".

You can change the driver file name and save path according to your needs.

Regenerate the installation disc

After the above steps, everything is ready now, just waiting for a dial!

Prepare any tool program that supports the preparation of boot-type CDs, such as the classic software "winiso", "isocommander", and domestic software "ultraiso. There are many ways to generate a bootable CD. To avoid searching for uncommon tools and software, use ultraiso as an example and perform the following steps:

(1) make the original installation disc image

The purpose of this step is to easily extract boot files from the created CD image. In fact, there are also dedicated tools for directly extracting the boot area of the CD, but the operation is a little troublesome, so it is worthwhile to spend one or two minutes here.

Put the original installation CD of Windows XP into the optical drive, start ultraiso, press the "F5" key, or execute "Create a CD image file" in the "Tools" menu ", specify the storage location of an image file as prompted, and then the program will automatically start to read the CD and complete the preparation of the image file.

(2) extract boot information from the CD image

On the ultraiso main interface, run the "Save boot file" command in the "Boot disc" menu (figure 6) to save the boot information to the hard disk for backup. For example, save it as "D: /boot. bin ".

(3) create a CD image

Run the "new" command in the "file" menu of ultraiso. From the resource manager, run the "D: all files in the/xpstat folder are dragged into the file window on the upper right of ultraiso.

Drag the "D:/statdrv" directory to the file window on the upper right of ultraiso. After that, you can see the "statdrv" folder in the root directory of the CD.

Prompt
Do not include the XP stat directory itself when dragging and dropping! That is to say, after the file is successfully added, the "i386" folder should be displayed under the root directory of the CD.

(4) load the boot information file

Run the "load boot file" command in the "boot CD" menu to find the boot file of the CD image extracted in the previous step, that is, "d:/boot. bin ". Now, the new CD image has the same boot function as the original Windows XP installation CD.

(5) Save the CD image

Press "Ctrl + S" or execute the "file"> "save" command to specify the path and file name (for example, "F:/xpstat. ISO), and then ultraiso starts to generate a CD image file to the specified path.

(6) Burn and install the CD

Use Nero or any other tool that allows you to burn a CD image file, and then burn the obtained CD image file (F:/xpstat. ISO) to the CD. Now, using this installation disk to completely install Windows XP in a hardware environment that supports SATA, you do not need to press F6 or use any floppy disk, which is very convenient.

Creating a Windows XP installation disc that integrates the SATA driver is a complicated task. Any small mistake may cause the driver to fail to be loaded correctly. In addition, the file names, quantities, and information files of SATA drivers attached to different boards vary, and cannot be hardcoded during integration. Only one of the three steps can be taken to succeed.

4. Q: Are SATA hard drive generic drivers available? A: The SATA driver is not a hard drive, but a SATA controller driver. It is divided into two categories: the Motherboard chipset South Bridge built-in and the third-party control chip added. Drivers of different manufacturers cannot be used in general.
Different manufacturers have different designs (which can be seen in BIOS settings). The SATA controllers of Intel, via, and SIS motherboard chips are different, let alone other third-party controllers, so it is unlikely that there will be a unified driver in the near future. The biggest hope is that Microsoft can directly integrate the SATA control driver of major manufacturers in the subsequent system installation discs, which is the most convenient.
Generally, a drive floppy disk is attached to the motherboard, but only the drive disc of the motherboard is provided. Copy the SATA drive file to the floppy disk. Some also need to use a specific program of the motherboard disc to create a SATA drive floppy disk, which needs to be described in the motherboard manual.

5. Q: Can SATA hard disks and PATA hard disks coexist?
A: Yes, but it may vary depending on the SATA controller settings.
The key to making SATA and PATA coexist peacefully lies in that the location of the occupied ide channel cannot conflict. Note that the DOS/Win98/winme system can only support a total of four ide devices, while the Win2000/XP/2003 system can support a total of six devices (note: third-party SATA controllers can break this limit ). The configuration of the path where SATA occupies the IDE channel varies with different manufacturers. Take the ich5 South Bridge of intel865pe chipset as an example: after entering the bios, select the IDE configuration menu under main and select two ide operation modes under the onboard ide operate mode: compatible mode and enhanced mode (compatible mode and enhanced mode ). The compatible mode can be understood as ing the SATA hard disk port to the corresponding port of the parallel ide channel, which is usually applicable to DoS/Win98/winme systems; the SATA hard drive in enhanced mode uses an independent ide channel, which does not conflict with the original PATA device, but is only applicable to Win2000/XP/2003 systems.
The configuration items vary slightly with the motherboard, which is complex. If you need to know more, read the motherboard manual and refer to the article "Clear-white SATA hard drive. As follows:

I. BIOS settings

Because the BIOS varies by motherboard, the setting principle is basically the same. Here we only introduce several typical BIOS settings, I believe that readers can refer to this article to solve the problem based on the actual situation of their own motherboard BIOS.

  1. The main board of the south bridge is ich5/ich5r

Take Asus p4c800 as an example. The Motherboard chipset is i865pe and the south bridge is ich5/ich5r. After entering the bios, select the IDE configuration menu under main. Under the onboard ide operate mode, you can select two ide operation modes: compatible mode and enhanced mode (compatible mode and enhanced mode ). The compatibility mode is compatible mode, which can be understood as ing the SATA hard disk port to the corresponding port of the parallel port ide channel. When you select this mode, there are three options in the following ide port settings:

Primary P-ATA + S-ATA: Parallel IDE Hard Drive occupies ide0 + 1 main channel (primary ide channel), serial SATA hard drive occupies ide2 + 3 slave channel (secondary ide channel ). That is to say, the port corresponding to the second parallel ide interface on the motherboard is unavailable.

Secondary P-ATA + S-ATA: the port corresponding to the first parallel ide interface (primary P-ATA) on the motherboard is not available at this time because it is occupied by the SATA hard disk.

P-ATA ports only: blocks serial SATA hard drive interfaces and can only use parallel interface devices.

Note: In the first two modes, the sata1 interface on the motherboard automatically corresponds to the primary disk location in the IDE channel, and the sata2 interface automatically corresponds to the secondary disk location in the IDE channel.

When the mode is enhanced mode, the port setting is changed to enhanced mode supports on. There are also three options:

P-ATA + S-ATA: parallel and serial hard disk co-existence mode, at this time SATA and PATA channel are independent of each other do not interfere with each other, theoretically 4 P-ATA and 2 S-ATA can be connected to 6 devices at the same time, in fact, depending on the motherboard, some nanqiao chips only support 4 ata devices. At this time, the sata1 hard disk corresponds to the third ide master (the third ide channel master disk), and The sata2 hard disk corresponds to the fourth ide master (the fourth ide channel master disk ).

S-ATA: Serial hard disk enhancement mode, at this time theoretically support 4 serial hard disks, but still have to look at the motherboard support (if the ich5r chipset such as p4p800, want to group raid mode, you must select this option and set the configure S-ATA as raid item to yes, the S-ATA bootrom item to enable, after setting, press Ctrl + I to perform raid settings during Automatic BIOS detection ).

P-ATA: in fact, it is still a ing mode, Sata hard disk occupies the first ide channel, sata1 port corresponds to the first channel of the main disk, sata2 port corresponds to the first channel of the slave disk.

When you are using Win98/Win NT/Win2000/MS-DOS and other traditional operating systems, since they only support four ide devices, please select compatible mode, select the corresponding options in IDE port settings based on your actual hard disk quantity and location. When you are using a new operating system such as WINXP/win2003, you can select enhanced mode to support more devices. Of course, if you install WIN98 + Win XP, you have to choose compatible mode. In addition, some motherboard BIOS has bugs, which make it impossible to correctly install the SATA hard disk (such as wasu-Hangzhou p4vt8) when installing the Windows 98SE system on a single SATA hard disk ), you only need to upgrade the BIOS version to the latest version.

  Note:Although the SATA hard disk does not have a master-slave relationship, if you use the port ing mode, when you want parallel hard disks and serial hard disks to coexist, you must note that the locations occupied by the hard disks do not conflict, the startup sequence also needs to be adjusted in BIOS according to the actual situation.

The following uses GA-8KNXP Ultra as an example to briefly describe the SATA settings in the BIOS of the gigabyte motherboard:

The chipset of this motherboard is i875p and the south bridge is ich5r. the SATA configuration options are in the integrated peripherals (Integrated peripheral devices) under the main menu, the configuration function is shown in the following table (only the configurations of SATA hard disks are listed ):

The options for device startup are in advanced BIOS features (Advanced BIOS settings). See the following table:

The above two examples show that the motherboard of ich5/ich5r South Bridge is set to identify the SATA hard disk through port ing and independent SATA channel. As to which mode and setting value should be selected, refer to the above and according to the number of S-ATA hard disk and P-ATA hard disk, the installed operating system and which one as the system boot disk and other actual conditions from the line set.

2. The South Bridge is the main board of the Via vt8237

Compared with the ich5/ich5r chipset, the SATA configuration of vt8237 is much simpler. In the following example, the SATA part of the suotek SL-KT600 series is set in the main menu integrated peripherals (Integrated peripheral devices:

Onboard pata ide (built-in parallel ide port settings)

This setting allows you to configure the built-in parallel ide port function of the motherboard.

Disabled: Disable the parallel ide port function of the motherboard.

Enabled: allows the use of parallel ide port function (default value ).

Onboard ides operate mode (built-in ide priority)

PATA is pri ide: The device priority on the PATA port (default value ).

Sata is pri ide: the device on the SATA port is preferred.

Onboard Sata-ide (with built-in SATA ports)

Disabled: Disable the SATA port on the motherboard.

SATA: the SATA port on the motherboard is used as a general SATA port.

Raid: A disk array (default value) can be created for the hard disk on the SATA port of the motherboard ).

You only need to adjust the priority of the serial and parallel ports according to the actual situation to use the SATA hard disk normally. (From the options above we can see that here the S-ATA hard drive can still be understood as ing to the P-ATA port for identification .)

Note: you also need to press the "tab" key to enter the BIOS settings of the via technology RAID Controller when the raid is created. For details, refer to the relevant instruction manual.

Ii. Partitioning of SATA Hard Disks

Currently, hard disks are usually partitioned by tools such as fdisk, DM, and PQ after the Win98/me Startup Program is started. As long as the SATA hard disk is correctly set in bios and can be identified after startup, the partitioning method of the SATA hard disk is the same as that of the traditional parallel hard disk.

If you use a boot disc such as Win2000, XP, or 2003 to start and partition, if your SATA hard disk cannot be identified, you need to prompt "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or raid driver on the screen... press f6 and use a soft drive to load the driver. When the hard disk is correctly identified, it is exactly the same as the traditional parallel hard drive partitioning method.

Note: Some boards do not come with drive floppy disks (such as  k7s8xe + and adopt sis748 + sis964 chipset), and their drivers cannot be copied directly from the disc directory to the floppy drive, it must be installed and created when the motherboard disc is started. Please read the motherboard instruction manual carefully.

  Iii. Operating System Installation

  1. Win98/me

No matter what chipset you are using, as long as you set the correct bios and let the motherboard identify the S-ATA hard disk, then you can install and use it normally. (Note: Of course, Windows 98/me and other systems can only support up to four devices .)

  2. Windows 2003, XP, and other nt core systems

Here because ich5 does not need to load the raid module, so direct installation can be (in fact, is to map the S-ATA to the P-ATA port to use, naturally just like the parallel hard disk ). The Southern bridge controller of ich5r is divided into two situations. One is to completely shield the raid module in the bios, so it is the same as that of ich5 and can be directly installed; the second is to enable RAID (which is enabled by default in BIOS). At this time, you need to press F6 at startup to use a soft drive to load the driver. In theory, vt8237 should be the same as ich5r, and most of its motherboard manuals also specify that it is only used as a general SATA hard drive without loading the driver (such as the giant SL-KT600-R ), however, the driver must be loaded no matter whether raid is used. Due to my limited access to products, I wonder if this is the case. Please try it on your own.

  Note:In addition to the S-ATA controller that comes with the South Bridge, other S-ATA Controller basic need to add driver, some motherboard in addition to its own South Bridge Support S-ATA, but also on-board promise and other third-party S-ATA and RAID Controller, note the difference.

 4. Driver Installation in the operating system

After the operating system is installed, you need to install the corresponding driver.

1. ich5 only needs to load the INF driver provided by Intel.

2. In addition to the INF driver, ich5r also needs to load the iaa3.0 or later driver.

3. vt8237 requires the install of patch via Hyperion 4-in-1.

If you still use parallel hard disks, it is best to use the via ide miniport driver program independently released by via, which may cause sudden decrease in the transmission rate of parallel hard disks, however, it has no impact on the performance of the serial hard disk.

  Note:If you are using a third-party SATA control chip and raid module, you also need to add the corresponding driver.

  Summary

From the above, we can see that the key to the use of S-ATA hard disk is to correctly set the identification method in bios, and because the BIOS menu of various motherboard manufacturers are not the same and the language of the motherboard manual is unknown, it causes various problems in the use of S-ATA hard disk. Due to the differences in R & D capabilities, it is unrealistic for the motherboard manufacturer to unify this part. Therefore, I only hope that readers can refer to this article, solve the problem based on your actual situation.

I wish all the friends who use SATA hard disks can use their SATA hard disks explicitly.

6. Q: Does SATA hard drive support partition tools such as fdisk and DM, and Ghost Software?
A: Of course. This kind of software is problematic most often because ich5 is the main board of nanqiao, because these software is based on the DOS platform, so as mentioned above, the compatible mode must be adopted ), when set to enhanced mode, failures that are unavailable to these software will occur.
In addition, when a SATA hard drive with a capacity of GB or above is used, the 48-bit addressing of a hard drive larger than GB is not supported because the partitioning software such as fdisk and DM was launched earlier, which may cause inexplicable faults, therefore, the most secure method is to use the XP system installation CD integrated with the SP1 Patch, which is used to install the system in only one system zone before the system is installed. (The same is true for 2000 systems. SP4 patches are required)
After the system is installed, first modify the registry and enter regedt32 in the running state. Create a key value under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/system/CurrentControlSet/services/atapi/parameters subitem: edit the menu bar to add a value, value name: enablebiglba, Value Type: REG_DWORD, value: 0x1. Then use the disk management function in the control panel-computer management tool to divide the remaining partitions.

7. Q: Can I install linux on a SATA hard disk?
A: Yes. For example, RedHat 9 must be set to compatible mode before installation. Otherwise, the hard disk cannot be found. After the kernel is installed, upgrade the kernel to 2.4.22. If the CPU used supports hyper-threading, select SMP support when compiling the kernel. Then modify the grub startup parameter, change hda to HDE, And the partition number remains unchanged. You also need to change the fstab. Otherwise, the "Swap" swap partition cannot be activated after startup. After restarting, change the compatible mode in BIOS to enhanced mode, so that you can use the performance of the SATA interface.

8. Q: it is said that SATA hard drive supports hot swapping. Can this function be used?
A: currently, the SATA technology is divided into V1.0 and V2.0 versions. V1.0 does not support hot swapping, and SATA implements hot swapping in V2.0.
Only the motherboard and the hard disk itself have an impact on hot swapping. As long as both the hard disk and the motherboard support this function and the correct driver is installed, hot swapping of the hard disk can be realized, it does not matter which operating system is used. The new hard disks on the market, such as the Seagate fish 7200.7.sata hard drive, support the V2.0 specification, and because the 4pin power plug of the traditional PATA does not support hot swapping, therefore, Seagate's hard drives do not support traditional PATA 4pin power connectors. This feature also requires motherboard support. Because Intel's ich5 nanqiao chip does not support hot swapping, i865 series boards do not support this feature. At present, there are few major board manufacturers officially announced that they support SATA hot swapping. Currently, there are only Huayuan. For details about the models that support this function, refer:

Http://www.asrock.com/product/index_china.htm
In addition, although the hard drive of the motherboard supports hot swapping, only the SATA data cable is hot-swappable without interrupting the power supply of the hard drive, which sometimes leads to the failure of the hot swapping function. Note that the interval between two consecutive hot swapping operations must exceed 5 seconds. Dedicated SATA control software is available for SATA controllers of SIS and other chips to make SATA hot swapping more secure and reliable. However, it seems that SATA's hot swapping technology is not yet completely mature. After all, the hard disk is more fragile than flash memory and other peripherals, so use hot swapping with caution.

Summary: The birth of each new technology, performance and function improvement will also be accompanied by the Inhabit of setting and using. At present, SATA interface devices have formed a trend. In the future, there will be more SATA devices in addition to hard disks. We need to hold on to the trend and learn about it as soon as possible. I only hope that this article will give readers a more comprehensive understanding of the SATA hard drive, avoiding the trouble of using it.