Windows 7 – Install With Multiple Disks
I set out this evening to install Windows 7 Ultimate on one of my “high end” desktops, and like all my desktops it has multiple SATA drives running in AHCI mode (after all, it’s “high end”).
No matter how I setup my drives in the BIOS or with the SATA cables I kept getting the larger (newer) drive as DISK0 in the Windows 7 install and the smaller (older) drive as DISK1.
Finally I started doing some reading on the Internet, and I’m not the only person who’s noticed this behavior. In fact, some say it’s random.
Based on what I’ve seen and what I’ve read I suspect that Microsoft’s EFI BIOS implementation re-polls [discovery] the drives and ignores what the PC legacy BIOS tells it… and the first drive to respond is DISK0. In my case the drive I want to be DISK0 is probably predictably slower than the drive I want to be DISK1, so I see consistent results. However, if the drives are very similar (or identical) you could see either become ready first (a micro-second counts).
This is obviously a bug in Windows 7 (didn’t happen in Vista; but apprently is did happen in Vista SP1 and SP2), and can cause all kinds of problems down the road.
What’s the best way to deal with it?
Open up your case and unplug all but the first drive, do your installation, then power up the drives one-by one (if you have hot-swap capability with SATA you don’t need to power down, if you don’t you will have to power down to plug in each drive in turn).
You can easily change the drive letters in disk manager; and once Windows tattoos the drives they should be fixed in order in disk manager.
If you have a motherboard that uses the Intel chip set you may want to download and install the Intel® Matrix Storage Manager for Windows 7.
If PCs used EFI BIOS (like Macs) this probably wouldn’t be an issue, but since Microsoft uses a soft EFI BIOS to boot, they should have tested this better, and they should have fixed it (there are several people who indicated they reported this behavior during the beta testing).
While Windows 7 might be a nice overhaul of Vista; it’s not without it’s problems, and maybe the whole PC heritage is beginning to be too antiquated to keep updating; perhaps it’s time for a new design.
Related posts:
- Windows 7 – Multiple Displays I have multiple displays on both my “high end” workstations. The one I’ve been testing Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on happens to have two nVidia...
- Windows 7 – Clean Install One of the best ways to insure that your computer will have an optimal installation of Windows 7 is to do a clean installation. Of...
- Upgrading Drive Firmware First, if you’re not having problems with your drive (unless it’s brand new, has no data on it, and you don’t have an issue returning...
- Windows 7 on a NetBook Tonight’s project was upgrading my MSI U120 NetBook from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium. I put the disc in the external...
- Affordable RAID5 NAS What a difference a year makes in the storage market… 1TB drives cost under $150 each and Network Attached Storage devices are almost consumer grade....
- Windows 7 – Boom or Bust? What is it about Windows 7 that’s supposed to be so great??? I’m at a total lose. Other than being a little faster than Vista...
- Computer Tid Bits I haven’t sent one of these tid bit emails out in a long long time — this is just a collection of little points that...
- Windows 7 – 32-bit or 64-bit? So you’ve got your new copy of Microsoft® Windows™ 7 and you’re ready to install it on your computer… but you have to decide whether...
- Windows Live Mail Bugs Make sure you’re sitting down, I wouldn’t want you to fall over — but there are bugs in Live Mail. I actually did the Beta...
- Revise Windows XP “Home” Directory Structure I gave this “tool” to a few of my friends a couple weeks ago and many of them thought it was kewl (a few even...
