Booting from SATA drive instead of IDE drive

[Benjhonson]

I was having Microsoft windows 7 operating system installed on my IDE hard drive. Few days before I have purchased SATA hard drive. I have implemented both the hard drive into my system. I want to install a new operating system on my SATA hard drive. I want to know if I can boot from SATA hard drive instead of IDE hard drive. If yes then I need a solution describing the steps so that I can boot from SATA drive to install new operating system instead of IDE.

[Dolsy_bendal]

If you are having two hard drives i.e. SATA and IDE connected in your system and you want to boot from the SATA drive instead of IDE then you need to do changes in the BIOS settings. You need to set the BIOS so that it starts to boot the system from that drive. The steps to boot from SATA drive instead of IDE are given below:

1. You need to start the system. When the system restarts you need to press either “DEL” or “F2” key from the keyboard to enter into the BIOS settings which is dependent on the motherboard.
2. Now you need to use the navigate keys to go to the BIOS boot options. You will get the first boot device and second boot device. If these two boot device are not present then you have a "CD-ROM Drive" option. Select CD-ROM drive option.
3. Then you need to go to the first boot device and change it to SATA drive as the first boot device and press the enter key to save it.
4. Press the F10 key to save the changes and restart the computer. Now the computer will boot from SATA drive instead of IDE drive.

[Benjhonson]

Thanks for providing me the solution. I was unaware of the steps to set the booting from SATA drive instead of IDE. From the above given solution it was possible for me to set the booting from SATA and my computer started to boot from the SATA drive. I want the make the SATA drive as primary master so that I can install new operating system. I want the steps to make the SATA drive as primary master and also the steps to partition the SATA drive

[kraal]

You can make the SATA drive as primary master so that you can install new operating system. To set the SATA drive as primary master you need to follow the steps given below:

• Start the system and press the DEL key to enter into the BIOS. In the BIOS setting you need to navigate to the advanced options. Press the enter button to open the advanced options.
• You need to navigate to the Hard Drive Boot Priority option. Press enter key to open it.
• Select the SATA drives from the list of available drive. After selecting SATA drive press the enter key to save the configuration.
• Press the ESC key from the keyboard to return back to the main menu. Press the exit option to exit from BIOS. You need to press Y to save the settings and now the SATA drive will be set as primary master. Restart the computer and the computer will boot from SATA disk.

[Luis234]

You should partition the hard drive so that the files are organized and indexing by the system is done easily. You can make use of operating system CD for partitioning the hard drive. The steps to partition the hard drive are given below:

1. Start the system and to my computer/manage.
2. After selecting manage option, Computer Management window will be opened.
3. You need to select the disk management from the Computer Management window. In the disk management window, you will get a list of all the drive.
4. Select the drive which you want to partition. If the drive is not having any allocated space then in that case you need to delete the previous partition.
5. Click on new partition to open it. In the new partition wizard click on next button and then select extended partition.
6. Now you need to enter the amount of the space for the new partition when prompted.
7. Click on finish button and the new partition has been created.