SATA HD question?

[cdb252]

My friend connected his hard drive to the #2 SATA port on the motherboard instead of #1, formatted and installed XP and all programs. Everything works OK.

He is wanting to know if it would be safe to move the connection to SATA #1
or would there be a danger that it would not boot or worse yet lose or damage the MBR or files and programs?

Actually, he is wanting to "slave" a friends HD and run antivirus and spyware programs on it. If he plugged the friends HD into SATA #1 would the computer still boot from SATA #2 as it does presently with nothing on #1?

Your comments are appreciated
Thanks.......cdb252

[Kevin_gibson]

I'd think the best thing to do first is back up any important data and try it, just incase it does / doesnt' work which won't leave you in the learch trying to find data.

I think if the jumper settings are all correct on the drive, it shouldn't make a difference, but back up incase.

[cdb252]

Thanks for the reply but, I have not seen any jumpers to set on SATA drives? Only on IDE drives.

cdb252

[Kevin_gibson]

Hi, sorry I miss-lead you on that info, I just double checked a spare SATA drive and you're right it doesn't have any jumpers, so I apologise lol.

I'd go with what I mentioned before, if you back up all important information before you do anything else then I shouldn't see a problem with it.

I swap tested my main hard drive and swapped it with my 2nd hard drive, and this didn't effect any data on either drive.

But to make sure, I backed up all important data first, none were removed nor did I have any other effects by doing so.

[snooker]

Hi , Just make sure in your bios setting it is in the correct order and you should be fine . I do it all the time

[cdb252]

Thanks guys, I am going to be putting a new system together in a few days so I will test this out and see if any problem results from changing from SATA #2 to SATA #1 and get back to this post with the outcome. Maybe it would help some folks to know what happens with that scenario.

cdb252

[cdb252]

For those that may be interested; I assembled a computer last night and the mother board had 4 SATA ports. I connected the hard drive to SATA 2 and the DVD burner to SATA 3. I then formatted the HD and installed Win XP Pro.

I then shutdown the computer and moved SATA 2 to 1 and SATA 3 to 2 on the mother board and re-booted. There wasn't any problem or data loss, all was well.

So, if you have need to move SATA devices to different ports on the mother board; you should not fear losing data or affecting the MBR adversely.

Thanks
Cdb252