• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Difference in booting from an IDE and a SATA HD

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

txyz

New Member
Joined
Mar 3, 2005
Sorry to be a little longwinded, but figured anyone would need to know the system to be able to suggest a solution to the problem.

ABIT IC7 G with a Prescott P4 3.2 GHz and two OCZ 512 MB enhanced latency PC3200 platinum rev. 2 modules in DIMM slots 1 and 3. The rated timings of the RAM are 2,2,2,5 and it will run Memtest overnight at these settings and default for the motherboard. Thermal Take XP 90 cooler on the CPU and a Swiftech MCX159-P with a Typhoon fan on the Northbridge. The power supply is an Antec Smart Power SP500 with dual fans. The BIOS has been updated to the latest release 28. The system is on the bench, not in a case.

I have the system overclocked to 3.7 GHz. clock 231MHz dividers 7:2:1 to give AGP:pCI of 66:33

The core voltage is 1.5125v, DDR SDRAM 2.8v and AGP 1.6v

RAM set to 2,3,3,5

The OS is Windows XP with SP 2 on a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST3160023A

With this overclock, Memtest will run forever with no errors and Prime 95 for an hour or so. If I back off the clock to 225MHz Prime 95 will also run forever.

Speed Fan shows the idle temperature to be 45 C and the loaded temperature to be 64 C. I don't like the 64C, but from what I have read on net the Prescott is in no danger at that temperature.

Now for the problem. The Seagate is running DMA5, but I wanted to do better so I bought a Seagate Barracuda SATA drive 7200.8 ST 33000831AS to use as a boot drive. I cloned the old C drive using Acronis True Image and set the SATA to be the boot drive in BIOS. The system hung on the first page of the bootup. Pressing Cntrl/Alt/Del did not restart it and pressing the Del key did not get me into Setup. It acted as though the BIOS had been corrupted so I cleared the CMOS and tried with default settings. The system booted into Windows from the SATA drive with no problem. Memtest and Prime 95 ran just fine. I then tried easing it up to an overclock, but almost immediately it locked up in bootup as it had before. I reconnected the IDE Seagate, reset the BIOS settings as above and the system is running perfectly.

In other words, I have a good stable overclock so long as I boot from the Seagate IDE drive and essentially am unable to overclock with the Seagate SATA drive -- although it will run perfectly at default values when booted from the SATA. Incidentally, the STD settings for the RAM are 2.5,2,2,5 so that is what you get if you simply run at default. I can set it to 2,2,2,5 and it runs both Memtest and Prime 95 (no overclock) overnight.

Do any of you have an explanation of why I can overclock if I boot from the IDE drive but not if I boot from the SATA drive
 
Last edited:
Back