Curse

Brianna · Jan 27, 2008, 06:05 PM // 18:05

Yeah so, I have a SATA drive and one of the older ones.. I think It's called PATA or something, the one used right before SATA came out. Anyway I've reformatted my computer onto a SATA drive, but sometimes I switch back to my old drive so I can get info off of it, can't get it to work as a secondary drive.. long story, too stupid to find out how to make it work.

Anyway so my question is; Is it okay to switch back and fourth between drives on the same computer? as Primary drives that is, It wont mess up the BIOS settings or anything? Cause this is about the 4th time I've done it and now my Guild Wars is getting lower FPS, even after many reboots.. Just wondering if that's cause I was switching drives around, either way thanks.

EDIT: Switched Guild Wars to only use 1 core, and it seems to have helped a little with the FPS, but it's still being funny.

MarxF · Jan 27, 2008, 06:10 PM // 18:10

Serial ATA is the next computerbus after Parallel ATA and IDE. The fact that you can't use both S-ATA and P-ATA at the same time doesn't really surprise me.

As for your question the answer is no. Switching harddrives a lot, technicaly, brings no inherent danger to the hardware nor to the performance of the hardware. However, it is possible that due to a lot of manual handeling of the harddrives (aka. you put them in your PC and out) a few bumps happen along the replacing which COULD damage them.

However, from what I can tell from your small story, this is certainly not the case. It just happends to be that windows gets slower the longer the OS is installed due to all the male-ware you get via the internet. Every once in a while re-installing your PC is the answer.

Brianna · Jan 27, 2008, 06:25 PM // 18:25

Yeah well, my P-ATA drive is all messed up, actually the windows on that drive was installed to an older motherboard, so its not any surprise that its slower, even though I can still play Guild Wars on it and not crash, I just don't use it. But my S-ATA drive has never been taken out of the comp since I put it in, I just unplug it, so I know I haven't bumped it for anything, and the OS on it is only a month old.

Also to add my Zune is messed up completely now, the software on this computer won't detect it even though the computer detects the device, but this isn't really the place that I should look for answers to that problem.

Tarun · Jan 28, 2008, 12:44 AM // 00:44

Switching drives has no ill-effects at all, unless you let the drive get banged around or subjected to elements/extreme temperatures.

What sort of problems does the older drive give? You should still be able to use it too. Who is the manufacturer? How is your old PATA drive messed up?

I must say I have no idea what MarxF is on about, with Windows getting slower the longer the OS is installed. As long as you defragment the drive it will be fine. I've gone for over three plus years without formatting my computer and have had no performance loss.

Brianna · Jan 28, 2008, 02:27 AM // 02:27

Hey Tarun, well, allow me to elaborate. The S.M.A.R.T Scan on bootup says that my PATA drive is bad, and I need to back it up and replace it. So mainly that is why, though it still actually works somewhat. it just has hiccups (Seems to stop responding for a few seconds, or lag), Some games/programs crash, etc. So I thought that installing a Hard Drive on one mobo - and switching it to another one was bad. Because prior to me doing all this, the hard drive worked perfectly, it was actually pretty fast! And I had no problems with programs/games.

But here's what I did; when I took my PATA drive from my other computer, and put it onto this one, I installed this motherboards drivers on it, and the video card drivers. Everything worked fine except the problems I mentioned above, and I was wondering if that was the ill effects of me switching it from comp-to-comp. But lately I've just been swapping both drives in this computer.

As for the PATA drives manufacturer; Western Digital, It's a 160GB HD.

And the new drive gives me no problems, working perfectly as it should.

Taki · Jan 28, 2008, 02:48 AM // 02:48

I had a similar problem not too long ago.

I added an IDE hard drive from an old computer and made it a slave. Everything worked fine for a while but then performance started to drop for certain tasks. After some hw scanning it turned out that the old drive was failing - it had bad clusters and got worse as time went by. When I disconnected it, the pc ran like new so I only hooked it up when I needed something off it.

I didn't take the bad clusters/sectors very seriously and took my sweet time backing up a few files once every week or so until eventually the drive failed and I had to use data recovery software to get anything from it. Unfortunately, I lost the very thing I wanted to save most - an archive from all my old digital cameras.

If you do have anything valuable on that older drive, it'd be a good idea to back it up as soon as you can and just replace the drive.

Brianna · Jan 28, 2008, 02:51 AM // 02:51

Oh no worries

I got all the important info off of it, If it dies it won't be any loss. I was kind of just curious about all of this, because I'm not very good with a lot of computer things, so I try to learn as much as I can, and of course I didn't wanna risk messing up my new drive somehow.

Tarun · Jan 28, 2008, 04:42 PM // 16:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brianna

Hey Tarun, well, allow me to elaborate. The S.M.A.R.T Scan on bootup says that my PATA drive is bad, and I need to back it up and replace it. So mainly that is why, though it still actually works somewhat. it just has hiccups (Seems to stop responding for a few seconds, or lag), Some games/programs crash, etc. So I thought that installing a Hard Drive on one mobo - and switching it to another one was bad. Because prior to me doing all this, the hard drive worked perfectly, it was actually pretty fast! And I had no problems with programs/games.

But here's what I did; when I took my PATA drive from my other computer, and put it onto this one, I installed this motherboards drivers on it, and the video card drivers. Everything worked fine except the problems I mentioned above, and I was wondering if that was the ill effects of me switching it from comp-to-comp. But lately I've just been swapping both drives in this computer.

As for the PATA drives manufacturer; Western Digital, It's a 160GB HD.

And the new drive gives me no problems, working perfectly as it should.

It's possible that you may be able to fix the drive. You can get HDTune to really look at the drive's SMART status. Post a screenshot so we can see what all is reported as wrong with it.

You can also download their Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Tools to scan (and often repair) the drive. Since it's a 160GB drive and PATA, it would take about 2-3 hours. You can get Western Digital's tools here. You can burn a CD-RW or use a floppy to scan the drive with.

Quaker · Jan 28, 2008, 06:29 PM // 18:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brianna

Oh no worries

I got all the important info off of it, If it dies it won't be any loss. I was kind of just curious about all of this, because I'm not very good with a lot of computer things, so I try to learn as much as I can, and of course I didn't wanna risk messing up my new drive somehow.

Basically, as I understand it, your problem is that, when you install the PATA drive, the system wants to boot from it, instead of the new SATA drive.

There are a couple of possible ways around that. One is to check in the BIOS to see if you can specify which drive to boot from. Another is to make the PATA drive not bootable by deleting Windows, but that involves some hidden files and technical stuff.

It also sounds as though you keep removing the SATA drive when you install the PATA drive, but there shouldn't be any need to do this.

My simplest recommendation would be:
- install both drives and let the system boot from the old PATA drive.
- Copy anything you need to keep onto the SATA drive.
- Remove (or simply, unplug) the SATA drive.
- boot the computer from the Windows CD. If it wants to boot the hard drive instead, you may have to get into the BIOS to change the boot order so the CD boots first.
- format the PATA hard drive, but don't install windows.
- reinstall the SATA drive.

It should then boot from the SATA drive (once you remove the Windows CD from the CD drive). Once you get back into windows (on the SATA) you should do a complete scan of the old PATA drive since SMART says there's a problem. Tell it to "scan for a attempt to recover, bad sectors". If there are a lot of bad sectors, you may as well just trash the old PATA.