FAQs: PC Hard Drive Questions

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FAQs: PC Hard Drive Questions

Postby Admin » Thu Aug 16, 2007 12:31 pm

What is all this stuff about IDE channels?

IDE channels are how hard disk drives are connected to a PC. Sky+ uses Parallel ATA IDE disk drives, and you will need to be able to connect 2 of these to your PC. SkyHD on the other hand uses a newer type of drive called Serial ATA.

Chances are if you are asking this kind of question, you don't know enough about PCs to be able to successfully complete this procedure. Please get someone with some technical experience to assist you.

My PC won't boot, what's wrong?

Probably you haven't set the jumpers correctly on the drives, or have set the wrong one to be Master. The disk which you have your Windows Operating System installed on usually needs to be configured as the Master on your first IDE channel. Remember that different drives from different manufacturers, and even drives from the same manufacturer, often have the configuration pins in a completely different order! If you are sure you have done that correctly, please see the next question....

Help! - My drives aren't working/recognised in my PC?

Are you sure you set the jumper correctly to Master/Slave/Cable Select as required by your PC?

Please check you have replaced the power and IDE cables correctly, that you have not damaged them, bent any pins on the connectors, have inserted them round the correct way, or pulled the cables lose at the motherboard end.

Also please check you have your Boot options set correctly in your motherboard BIOS, and that you have the latest BIOS version for your PC. This is particularly important if you have SATA drives in your PC and you are attaching PATA drives for use with Copy+. Often this causes the PC to refuse to boot successfully with the PATA drives attached. It would appear that some systems are near impossible to configure successfully.

If all else fails we suggest you use a USB caddy instead. These are a whole lot easier to use and configure, as well as being hot pluggable.

Copy+ still isn't recognising my new drive in the destination drop-down. What's wrong?

You did initialise the disk from Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management - Didn't you?

Read the instructions section if you don't know how to do this.

If the disk you are attempting to use as a destination has previously been used in Sky+, or in a PC, chances are it already has one or more partitions on it. Copy+ will not allow a disk with existing partitions to be used as a destination - it assumes all partitions have data in them you'd like to keep! If you want to reuse a disk, please delete the partition from Windows Disk Management first. Please make absolutely sure you have the correct disk before you delete! Once you have deleted the partition, restart Copy+ or click the "Refresh Drive Lists" button.

But I have Serial ATA (SATA) IDE drives on my PC! What does that mean?

SATA is replacing PATA on new PCs. If you don't have the ability to connect legacy (Parallel) ATA drives, then purchasing external caddies is probably the easiest option.
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