Hardware Few Questions after replacing MB

[Zetta_x]

Ok, so I pretty much overhauled my system. New Motherboard, new case, new wireless card, new graphics card, new harddrive.

The motherboard I have is ASUS M4A88TD-M

So I put everything together, turned it on, and first thing it says is no device connected and then it continues to boot to my WD green harddrive. Half-way loads windows 7 ult and then BSOD. That was pretty expected.

So instead of trying to work things out with that HDD, I decided to go ahead and install a clean copy of windows on my WD black HDD. Everything goes perfect, activated my windows, started re-installing drivers etc...

Few questions:

How come it says scanning... no device connected but then proceeds to load windows?
I want to basically use my WD green HDD as a storage device without moving anything off, my plan was:

Remove windows partitions, expand to unallocated space, delete everything but the stuff I wanted.

Is this a fullproof plan or is my computer configured to use the windows partition on the green even when I did a clean install on the black?

Thanks in advance,
Brandon

 

[Originality]

That's usually the RAID controller report. Since you've not configured your HDDs to RAID, it's just saying that it's not being used.

Since your WD green HDD is giving you BSODs, either something is corrupted or there's some bad sectors on the HDD. First thing to do - scan it (disk check and SMART report at least). Run a battery of tests to find all the bad parts. Once that's done (it should internally flag bad sectors and stop writing to them in future), you can do whatever you want with it - it should work as normal.

As for boot device (if you're worried it'll try booting off the WD green), you should be able to set the HDD priority in BIOS, either in the boot device menu or the HDD order menu (depending on how ASUS configured BIOS of course).

 

[Zetta_x]

I'm not too concerned with the BSOD with the green drive. I have replaced my cousin's motherboard before and windows BSOD with the new hardware. To fix it is a simple repair installation within windows (It BSOD's near the same spot when it says starting windows). Thanks for the tip with the raid controller on the motherboard, I will look to bypass that screen. When I had the HP motherboard, it would always detect the harddrive and other sata drives so I was kind of curious why this one was not detecting it.

I'm still going to check disk with the green drive since I did have it out for a week sitting around, it's possible that something on the disk may have got corrupted.

I plan on using a partition manager to pretty much make it into one partition and use it as a removable storage device.

 

[Originality]

"When I had the HP motherboard, it would always detect the harddrive and other sata drives so I was kind of curious why this one was not detecting it."

You're referring to different parts of the bootup sequence. First it surveys all connected drives (PATA then SATA - this part is often hidden by a splash display/logo), then that extra screen saying "not detected" is created by a completely seperate SATA controller that's used exclusively for RAID. Asus and Gigabyte both like using at least 2 (if not 3 or 4) SATA controllers with different roles to generally increase speed to the SouthBridge (e.g. SATA II, SATA III, RAID, RoG RAID (it's supposed to be 2-4x faster than normal RAID)...).

 

[Zetta_x]

"When I had the HP motherboard, it would always detect the harddrive and other sata drives so I was kind of curious why this one was not detecting it."

You're referring to different parts of the bootup sequence. First it surveys all connected drives (PATA then SATA - this part is often hidden by a splash display/logo), then that extra screen saying "not detected" is created by a completely seperate SATA controller that's used exclusively for RAID. Asus and Gigabyte both like using at least 2 (if not 3 or 4) SATA controllers with different roles to generally increase speed to the SouthBridge (e.g. SATA II, SATA III, RAID, RoG RAID (it's supposed to be 2-4x faster than normal RAID)...).

Thanks for the information

 

[Jasper07]

It is a fullproof plan, as long as you don't accidently install in the wrong drive

And btw, nice motherboard, I have almost the same one.

 

[Zetta_x]

It is a fullproof plan, as long as you don't accidently install in the wrong drive

And btw, nice motherboard, I have almost the same one.

The motherboard is working pretty well right now, it was pretty cheap and I got a few USB 3.0 and SATA III ports out of it. The temperatures are doing pretty nicely but then again it's like a million times better then my last stupid foxconn-HP motherboard.

I have spent the last 3 hours deleting old windows stuff and re-organizing my data and tying them into the windows library features for quick access. The only problem I ran into was trying to delete the windows folder but a quick google search fixed that

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Edit: that would be pretty hilarious if I accidentally mixed up disk 0 and disk 1 and installed on the green drive. I would cry lol

 

[hatredg0d]

its no supprise you couldnt boot your old copy of windows, you changed the mobo out.

 

[Zetta_x]

its no supprise you couldnt boot your old copy of windows, you changed the mobo out.

Yeah, I figured as much. I was going to do a clean install regardless whether it BSOD on the old harddrive or not. The last time I changed the motherboard was when the computer had XP and that blue-screened until I did a repair installation. I heard windows 7 was a little bit more better with major hardware changes but I guess not. It's cool, the only thing I wanted from the old operating system was a quick way to check out the temperatures were running with the new paste, extra fans, but instead I had to download graphics drivers, etc.. wasn't too much of a setback I just didn't want to fry my computer.