Formatting questions

Hi all, Im sorry if this is not the space for this cause I dont know to use forum so much,but I want to make something clear:
I have changed my sata type from ahci to ide and than formated with xp and 7 (dualboot) and make 3 partitions, but now I need to change it again to ahci and it needs to be formated, but what I wanna know is: when I change the sata type again, does the data in other partiton exept C: can be deleted? (D: and E:)??

Thanks so much!

vrifaj said:

Hi all, Im sorry if this is not the space for this cause I dont know to use forum so much,but I want to make something clear:
I have changed my sata type from ahci to ide and than formated with xp and 7 (dualboot) and make 3 partitions, but now I need to change it again to ahci and it needs to be formated, but what I wanna know is: when I change the sata type again, does the data in other partiton exept C: can be deleted? (D: and E:)??

Thanks so much!

you can't change that. your hard drive is what it is.
if you have a big flat ribbon cable on it it's a IDE (aka pata etc)

a sata drive has a small cable about a 1/2 inch wide.

Running your SATA controller in either IDE or AHCI mode simply changes the way the controller and the drive talk to each other (and consequently, the driver Windows uses to talk to the controller).

This does not affect any data, files, partition layouts or anything else on your disk at all.

The only thing to watch out for is that you must enable the MSAHCI driver in Windows 7 before you reboot and change the SATA type in your BIOS.
With XP it's unfortunately a bit more complicated - in fact I don't know the exact steps, but Google will no doubt turn up something.