SATA Boot as Removable Drive ?

Recently a buddy installed a new ASUS board with SATA boot via onboard SATA. SATA drives showed up as removable. Didn't like that so we installed a SATA PCI card and they functioned normally.
Then we freshened up an MSI MS-6788 board using the onboard SATA to boot a SATA Raptor drive. Did the F6, install other drivers during XP Pro install.
These drives functioned normally.
Which was one reason I chose MSI for the new build I just finished yesterday. Using the MSI P6N I installed a Raptor as the boot drive, a second Raptor and a SATA CD/DVD player.
F6 during install was not necessary as it recognized the drive. It boots fine and all drives are recognized but again these are showing up as removable drives.
Doe anyone know the definitive answer to this or what I'm doing wrong.
MSI tech wrote me back a short note saying SATA showing up as removable is normal. I don't buy that. I have (and have seen) too many systems whereas SATA boot and internal devices "don't" show up as removable using both add-on cards and on board SATA.
As well the older MSI MS-6788 does not show the devices as removable.
Thanks...

I totally agree. But this is far from a server board. Let me ask... when was the last time you "hot swapped" a SATA drive?
Especially plugged into the onboard SATA.
I just don't follow the concept. For the sake of being hot swappable...
... you get a c:boot and d: internal drive that show they can be ejected (when in reality they can't because they are being used).
...and then you can eject your CD/DVD drive (which I can't see the reason to do).
... and then to top it off you plug in a USB stick and it's the 4th ejectable device.
Somewhere there should be the criteria to untick a box that says "this drive is not removable".

Similar Messages

How to install Windows on a SATA boot drive

Here is how to install Windows XP on a SATA boot drive. This procedure was first developed by syar2003 and has been used by many iusers ncluding myself. Although it was originally developed for Neo2 mb's and Windows XP Pro, it has general applicability to systems as well.
1. Have only the SATA drive you want to be the boot drive active in your system. Disconnect the power to all other HDD's if any.
2. Have only one optical drive active. Disconnect the power to the other opticals if any. (Best to have a burner optical as master on IDE1.)
3. Plug SATA drive into SATA 1 on the mb. (it may show us as an IDE drive somewhere down the list in BIOS. That's okl)
4. Enable appropriate SATA options in BIOS. Set boot order to floppy, cd, SATA drive. Set boot priority to SATA drive.
5. Partition and format the SATA HDD using the utilites CD that came with the SATA drive. (If you don't have an HDD utilities disk, download one from the website of your HDD manufacturer.)
6. Run Windows setup. No need to load drivers at the F6 promt unless you are planning to do a RAID configuration.
7. Windows XP should install without incident.
8. After you are up and running, plug the power back into your other HDD and optical drives if any.
If you have a board older than the K8 series, it may be necessary to load the SATA drivers at the F6 prompt. If the above procedure does not work, than try it again loading the SATA drivers.
If this procedure does not work for you, it is likely that your particular SATA HDD has some compatablity problem with Windows setup and/or your motherboard. The solution to this is to try another SATA drive. In general, most failures using this procedure have been traced to certain WD, Seagate and Hitachi SATA drivers of smaller capacities. Fewer problems seem to have occured with Maxtor HDD's.

Kaplan, from an earlier post of mine regarding sata2 hdds - I have them plugged into the sata1&2 ports, installed the nvidia raid first and then installed winxp (in both raid 0 and raid 1). My bios is 3.1 and its a known problem that bios 3.3 & 3.4 have nvidia raid problems but seems to be fixed in the beta bios 3.53:
I just purchased 2 hitachi deskstar sata2 80gb hdds ($60 each at zzf) and the interesting thing about them is that you have to "enable" sata2. I have been testing the performance of sata1, sata2, raid1 and raid0 and the results are below.
The drives themselves are factory default set at sata1. Since I purchased OEM, no software or instructions were included. I had to go to the hitachi website download section to download a dos based program (the features program) to enable sata2. After enabling the hdds to sata2, they were recognized in winxp in the nforce ADMA controller device driver and the screen reads with the primary channel as Serial ATA Generation 2 - 3G...and all 4 boxes below it are checked (the boxes enable bios select xfer mode, enable read caching, enable write caching and enable command queuing are checked). An interesting thing about the sata2 spec is that all sata2 hdds must come standard with NCQ...its not advertised on these 80 gb hdds on the hitachi website (unlike the larger hitachi sata2 hdds) but its a standard sata2 spec and these 80gb hitachi hdds are recoginized in winxp as sata2.
The other interesting feature about the hitachi sata2 hdds is setting them up to operate in an adjustable "performance" to "silence" mode. The hdds are default set at high perfromance but you can manually lower the performance to increase the silence of the hdds which is fully adjustable to your liking. I tested the highest silence/lowest performance setting and you cannot hear the hard drive at all.
Testing - I tested the 2 hitachi sata2 deskstars with the first result in sata1 mode, the second in sata2 mode, the third in raid1 mode and the fourth in raid0 mode.
First, a significant increase in raid0 over sata1, sata2 and raid1 with sequential reads and writes (PC Wizard).
Write: 28mb/s vs 29mb/s vs 27mb/s vs 53mb/s
Read: 45mb/s vs 46mb/s vs 43mb/s vs 83mb/s
Second, significant increase in sata 2, raid 1 & raid 0 over sata1 with buffered reads and writes (PC Wizard).
Write: 104mb/s vs 176mb/s vs 165mb/s vs 266mb/s
Read: 123mb/s vs 200mb/s vs 200mb/s vs 293mb/s
Third, significant increase in sata 2, raid 1 & raid 0 over sata1 with burst reads (HD Tach).
Burst Read: 133mb/s vs 225mb/s vs 219mb/s vs 334 mb/s
It is interesting to note that raid1 is better than sata1 but marginally slower in all tests over sata2. Raid0 is significantly faster on all tests.

Z68 WIN 7 will not boot after setting drive BIOS from IDE to SATA

MSI Z68MA-ED55 (B3) Motherboard
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit OS
SATA III Solid State Drive with greater than 500 MB/s throughput
After installing WIN7 and all my Applications programs I noticed in the BIOS that the driver for the SSD did not properly set to fully support the SSD but remained in the IDE mode.
This computer was built for technical graphics work and not for child's play. So I don't want to have to reinstall all the applications software for work with all its required protection features from theft.
QUESTIONS:
1. With this high transfer rate SSD, is it worth the performance improvement to reset the BIOS from the IDE driver to the proper driver?
2. If so, how can I set the BIOS to the correct driver without reinstalling everything?
3. At some level of the installation the system should have sensed the SSD SATA III and changed the driver from IDE. Where should this take place?

Hi,
I had the same problem. You need to put it back to IDE, boot to Windows then follow the below instructions and it works fine. (Courtesy of Guru3D)
Enable AHCI
The last tip we want to give you to gain a little extra performance boost is that you enable AHCI mode. AHCI mode can help out greatly in performance for SSDs. Now, if you swap out an HDD for an SSD with the operating system cloned and THEN enable AHCI in the BIOS, then you'll likely get a boot error / BSOD.
The common question is, is there a solution for this ?
To answer that question (and as we do safely with all modern chipsets) there is a way to safely enable AHCI mode. Here we go:
1. Startup "Regedit"
2. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SYSTEM / CurrentControlset / Services
3. Open msahci
4. In the right field left click on "start" and go to Modify
5. In the value Data field enter "0" and click "ok"
6. exit "Regedit"
7. Reboot Rig and enter BIOS (typically hold "Delete" key while Booting)
In your BIOS select "Integrated Peripherals" and OnChip PATA/SATA Devices. Now change SATA Mode from IDE to AHCI.
You now boot into windows 7 or Vista, and the OS will recognize AHCI and install the devices. Now the system needs one more reboot and voilla ... enjoy the improved SSD performance.

Sata Raid with spare drive not booting?

Hi Peeps,
Been reading throught this forum and founds loads of good tips already, however, I still can't find the answer to my problem.
Just setup 2 new Maxtor (250gb) drives as Raid 0, made them bootable and installed Windows XP SP2. All works fine and dandy. I have tried to install my 3rd Maxtor 250gb drive as a spare on port 3 or 4 but it won't boot saying something about the drive config.
I have disabled Sata 3 & 4 in the bios, changed the boot order (Raid first, Channel 3 last) but no joy.
What the hell am I doing wrong or is it not possible to do?
BTW: If I change the boot order so the single Sata drive is first, it will boot into my drive but not able to see the raid disks!!
Thanks for any help you can give
Tigger
Spec:
AMD Athlon 64 +4000GHz
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (Socket 939)
2 x 1gb Ebuyer RAM
3 x 250GB Maxtor Diamondmax 10 (Sata 150)
48x DVDRW
48x DVD
550wat PSU
256MB Radeon 850XT Pro,
Bios 0.3a (Latest)
Samsung 19" Syncmaster 930BF

Tigger I haven't seen anyone post this issue on a non-SLI Neo4. Is the spare disk setup as a spanning drive(JBOD)? See my posts here in might fix your problem:
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=98437.0
Loopy, I don't know much about the Neo Plat regular, you could try the above also, but I'm not sure you have the same problem as Tigger.

Using SATA Boot Drive & Promise UATA Card

I recently decided to put an extra 2, 200 gb hard drives into my system using a PCI ATA Controller Card. The only problem I have doing this is that my SATA Boot drives won't boot. The system Bios keeps trying to boot from the PCI Hard drives. Is there anything I can do to fix this or am I pretty much SOL and should just buy a K8T800? Specs are listed below.
MSI K7N2D-ILSR
Athlon XP 2500
2x256 PC3200 CL 2.0
NVidia 5700 Ultra 128

your out of luck unless msi sort the bios out,which i dout will happen
its a shame as other older boards have multiple boot options,ie onboard raid or a card

Boot Failure - removed ata100, now won't boot from SATA

Hi all.
I have neo2fis2r. I had it running fine with 2 disks. System on Sata maxtor 120gig, second disk Maxtor ata133 160gig.
Then i removed ata133 disk 160gig and still all worked fine.
Then i changed my bios settings to "load high performance details" for test, and it didn't boot anymore.
Then i changed bios to "Load Bios setup defaults" and still no bot.
I dont see my sata boot disk in Boot Device Select/Boot device Priority.
What to do? pls help.
gnd

Enable both "SATA and PATA" in the Integrated Peripherals -> onboard IDE configuration.

KM4M-V + SATA Drive, Hangs at Boot, Tried IDE Drive and During Setup, Powers Off

I bought 2 KM4M-V boards to upgrade my ailing 1880+ systems. Then realized I needed DDR as well so went back for that and also decided to update CPU's to Sempron 2600+. Also picked up Seagate 80Gb SATA and a 350 watt PSU (Alaska ATX 350 P4) which was recommened for this board by the dealer.
I am having so much trouble I am about to throw in the towel. Since I am 'upgrading' everything in the system except the CDRom drive I should have just started all over with 64-bit systems but now I am kind of stuck since it is over 30 days ago I got the MB's.
Problem 1:
Using only the single SATA drive I never could get past the DMI Pool data line in Setup, it would just hang there. I read all about how to deal with SATA drives with this or similar boards here. SATA is enabled in BIOS but I can never get to the F6 load drivers step to try that. If I remove the SATA cable Setup will procede so it is something with the Seagate possibly? No jumpers needed and no preparation done to the drive. BIOS does not see the drive but the setup RAID utility does see it but says I cannot set up single drive as RAID of course, but it does report proper data about the drive. Never can get past Bios POST with SATA drive hooked up (channel 0 or 1)
Finally gave up on that and ran into Problem 2:
Put an older IDE drive in as only HD and XP Windows setup gets cranking along coping files then the system just dies. Like some pulled the plug suddenly. Happen every time. I checked for heat problems. Even ran through memory tests (SIMMTESTER), tried swapping cables, plugs and wall circuits. It dies every time no matter what.
Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

Quote from: Fredrik Åsenius on 24-November-05, 05:57:01
DMI pool data? When changing mobo but keeping hard disk one should do a repair install of Windows and install the mobo drivers for the new mobo.
I originally wanted to keep the Windows install but decided to remove original C drive and save for eventual D drive use. A repair install warns you that your 'My Documents' folder 'may' be deleted and I didn't want to risk it as I have years and years of photos I didn't want to risk losing.
Quote
Addit: Seems something isn't right in the IDE configuration, or what Windows think is the config.
Bios is happy with WD drive as single master on one channel and CDRom as single master on the other (No jumper on Drive- osnavi). Windows install starts out just fine with my intention of creating a new partition but then it just BOOM, power off. My preference is to use the new SATA Baracuda as system drive and my old IDE C drive as D drive...

How would I go about changing my harddrive to a SATA III 6Gbit/s drive?

I want to replace my 250GB hard drive in my macbook pro from 2009. How would I go about changing it to a SATA III 6Gbit/s drive?
Do I also need to replace RAM or anything else? What step should I take?
Thank you!

You can certainly install whatever drive you like, but your Macbook Pro is fixed at SATA II. SATA III drives will work fine, but only up to 3Gb/s (which far exceeds a rotational drive's read/write speeds anyway).
In practical terms, if you want to copy your current system onto the new drive, you would need to buy an external enclosure (Firewire or USB2), install the new drive in that and format it Mac Extended using Disk Utility. Clone your current system over using SuperDuper.
Make sure the new drive is named something different from the original drive to distinguish them when you restart. Test that it will boot by holding down Option as you power up the computer.
Remove the new drive from the enclosure and install it using iFixit guides.
If you don't want to use the files on your current drive, you don't need the enclosure, but it's recommended, so you can use your current drive as extra storage after you do the upgrade.
Matt

How do I fix my early 2008 mac pro boot hard disk. Lost everything when it crashed hard, can not reinstal via cd/dvd drive... are there any fix get it boot from dvd drive?

I have an early 2008 MAC PRO Quad Core 3.0ghz processor. 8 Gig of rams, with a 1 Gig memory Radeon 5770 HD Graphic Card running the latest Version of Snow Leopard OS. Last week lighting struck the house take out all of my hard drives (4) thank god the surge protector mitigated the mother board from damaged, use the Parted Magic to check out the motherboard and it intact with no damage. I can boot with the Parted-magic and be able surf and post this question to this forums. I replaced a newly formatted hard drive and trying to installed OS X Mountain Lions to the new drive, but unable to have it boot in my MAC PRO DVD, I get the usual chimes during the booting processed but the screen remain blackout, but able to boot with Parted-Magic to surf the web and access Apple sites/forums.
I am not well verse in using the Parted_Magic to repair or get my-mac to boot normally so I can reinstall OS X. Any help would appreciated.
Thank you
Disabled Veteran.

Go to System Profile and look, does it say "MacPro3,1"?
That is 2008.
FBDIMM would be 800MHz. Did you use older slower 667MHz in yours?
You can but take a hit in performance.
Sounds like MacPro1,1.
Mac Pro (3.0GHz quad core (dual CPUs) 8GB 667 RAM)
In 2007 March an 8-core 3GHz did come out 2,1.
So just to be clear.
===========
It was all working fine a couple of days ago. At the time it randomly shut down I was trying to use Boot Camp to create a Windows 7 area,
Whenever you want to install Windows, remove all the drives other than the one Windows goes to. And if you use a dedicated drive YOU DO NOT NEED Boot Camp Assist, unless you use XP, which really is limited and crippled (one processor, 1.9GB RAM support).
And when it freezes, your only choice is to nuke (reformat) and restore or get out that backup CLONE you made before (ie, Step #1 in the Boot Camp Guide).
Sure that whole NTFS / MBR / GUID could be an issue, but you should just have a blank drive or clone.
No don't bother Apple, they seem to not have a good sense about Windows on Mac Pro anyway.
Other than zap pram from cold boot / tried booting with NO drives inside and just 10.6. DVD - should be fine.
You should be fine iwth Windows 7 DVD and one drive, or even XP.
Make sure you take your time and reconnect cards etc properly and any cables.
Booting from OS X DVDs may not work if there is a drive with a totally shot directory or partition table. Put them in FW case and turn on AFTER OS X is booted.
Why aren't people Cloning as a Backup Strategy
Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.2
How To clone

PT880 New system won't boot to any drive

I am putting together a new system:
Case: Aspire X-Superalien
Power Supply: 500w (came w/case) which says:
AC INPUT: 115V/230V~ 10/5A 50-60HZ
DC OUTPUT: +3.3V +5V +12V -5V -12V +5VSB
28A 30A 34A 0.3A 0.8A 2.0A
+5V +3.3V COMBINED LOAD: 200W
+12V +5V +3.3V COMBINED LOAD: 480W
TOTAL POWER: 500W
(no idea what all that means, but you guys seem to)
The PS also has 2 blue 80 mm lighted fans
Motherboard: PT880 NEO LSR
Processor: Intel P4 2.8 GHZ 800MHZ bus 1MB L2 cache (HT) Prescott
Video Card: GeForce 2 MX400
Disk Drives: Western Digital 200GB hard drive (formatted on another computer,
no OS yet)
LiteOn DVD rewritable drive
Mitsumi 3.5 in. floppy drive
Operating System: none yet, will use Windows XP as soon as I can get to my
drives.
I can get to my BIOS. All my drives appear in BIOS and show up as the correct slave, master settings. I have disabled all the SATA RAID stuff. When I try to boot up, it does a memory test, lists all my drives and stuff...then freezes. I have tried changing the boot up order of my drives into all possible orders. The four lights on the back give me different messages each time. Nothing consistent there. What could be keeping me from booting to my drives?

Your PSU looks to be quite capable of handling a Prescott, so as Raidahs said, all you need is the BIOS flash. I asked you for your rail by rail currents in another post, but as I see them here, never mind. Unfortunately, since Intel kept making changes to the Prescott, the earliest BIOS that will run the Prescott for this board is v1.4. The boards are shipped with v1.1, which is rather aggravating. If you don't have access to a Northwood chip (P4 with 'C' after it's speed, ie. 2.8C), I would suggest contacting either MSI or whoever you purchased your board from, and ask them to update your BIOS. Do not let them talk you into paying for this service, as the board's packaging plainly states that it is designed for the Prescott, despite the fact that it does not support it out of the box.
If you have any problems, just let us know. Heck, keep us posted no matter what happens

How to get a Power Mac G4 to boot in slave drive (firewire) mode?

Have tried every trick in the book to get my G4 (dual 450, OSX 10.4.9) to boot as a firewire slave drive. (Want it to be a firewire driver for a new Mac Mini.)
Machine refuses to restart in that mode even if I select that startup mode from System Preferences.
Have also tried holding down the "T" key upon reboot. Machine begins to cycle up, then shuts down after about 15 seconds. I am using the keyboard that came with the machine when I attempt this.
Have read that some software (called OPEN OPTIONS) may be installed in Utilities folder. This app can be used to prevent someone from starting the Mac in "T" mode. However, the default is OFF. Further, there's no copy of that software anywhere on the machine. Further, I've done a clean reinstall and booted from that drive but it, too, refuses to boot in slave mode.
Only thing I can figure is the SONNET ATA/133 card is interfering. (Cannot remove it as it enables the 250GB drives I want to share in the first place.)
Any thoughts or ideas?

See How to Use Firewire Target Disk Mode
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583
 Cheers, Tom

Automountd crash - can't see removable drives

Hi,
I have a Power MAC G4 tower running Leopard (v10.5.4). I also have a Western Digital external hard drive (250 GB) attached via firewire that contains my iPhoto Libraries.
Recently, the WD drive does not appear in my Finder window. It is detected by the System Profiler app but not the Disk Utility. I am also having similar issues with a thumb drive via USB.
I have attached the WD drive to a PowerBook G4 notebook (also running 10.5.4) and it sees the drive with no problems.
The tower also has a patch for MobileMe - coincidentally, the WD drive stopped showing up in Finder when I installed this patch. The notebook does not have this patch.
Also, I see in my /Library/Logs/CrashReporter that I have several recent crash file reports from the automounter. The automount crash log seems to appear even with the WD drive powered off during boot of the tower.
Has anybody run into this problem and have some advice on how to see my removable drives again?
Thanks in advance,
-Brenda

Hi bstef,
Something definitely seems wrong with your system. automountd should not be crashing, and based on the description you provide about your external drives, I wouldn't be surprised if other daemons (like diskarbitrationd) are also crashing.
You might want to have a look at your system.log, which you can see in the Console application. In that log you're looking for further clues as to what is causing some of your system processes to crash. It would probably be a good troubleshooting step to open the Console, view the system.log, then try to attach one of your drives that is not showing up. Hopefully you'll be able to see in real time some system errors.

Firewire removable drive eject problem

Hi
I have one of those intermittent failures which is driving me crazy. I've got a Granite Digital removable FW-800 drive hooked up to my Quad (10.4.7). Also have a SATA removable drive bay. Most of the time, external drives work just great, and there's no problem.
However... often enough to make me ask it here, I'll eject the drive, via drag to the trash in the dock, or via contextual menu "eject" and, after a bit longer pause than usual, the icon will disappear from the finder's desktop. Everything looks good, but...
... when I go to turn off the drive, or remove it, I get an "improperly put away...may damage drive" message.
And then... it's totally impossible to restart or shut down the machine. A power off is needed.
Leaving aside comments on how long the software should be looking for an obviously missing drive before simply giving up (hint: infinity is too long) there's this.
What's happening? (don't say that something is open on the drive... nothing is) and two, is there something I can do once I get this message to prevent the infinite look? Terminal command? Anything?
OK: one more thing - am I the only person this happens to?
TIA
Tracy
ex-programmer and Mac user since 1984...

Gleaned from a string of several painful experiences...
When "OFF" isn't really "off."
When it's a switch on the back of some, and certainly firewire boxes fall into the "some" category, peripheral boxes. I spent I don't know how many hours chasing this down because I forgot something I'd learned a few years ago: it's OK to switch off the power to an external firewire box using the switch on the back of the box, but it's NOT OK to switch it off by turning off (unplugging) the "brick" or using a master controller that turns off the AC power.
Why? Because "off" isn't really "off"... keeping the "brick" alive keeps the system informed about the firewire device's presence; turn it off "at the wall" and you're going to seriously confuse the system. In my system, it would work this way: if I left the box switch in the "on" position, then when I turned on the wall power, the hard drive would show up on my desktop.
Now, I was always religious about ejecting the drive before I powered down, but my mistake was powering down "at the wall" instead of using the switch on the back of the box. I figured I'd save the power drained by the brick when I wasn't using the drive.
Bad mistake. About 50% of the time, when I'd eject the -next- drive I mounted externally, I'd get a message saying "improper device removal"... and my system would -seriously- choak up. Nothing would run; nothing would quit and I'd be faced with a forced hard power-off of my whole system.
Once I recalled what the heck I was doing wrong, and reverted to "once powered on, leave it on" the problems went away.
The problem seems to affect external SATA drives as well (although I'm not as positive of that as I am of the firewire issue.) So: leave the boxes plugged into the wall, and only use the switches on the back to turn them on and off. If the wall-wart bricks are eating up extra power, I'm afraid that's the price you pay for the modern age.
hth
Tracy

SATA boot with IDE hard dr. installed

Newbie here. I'm so proud of myself. MoBo is KM4M-V w/latest BIOS and Athlon XP 2600+ CPU. 2 CDROMs, Zip Dr. and 60GB HD in a Pull-Out use up all 4 IDE's. So I had to use SATA 80GB as boot up. With 60gb NOT plugged into Pull-out, Win XP installs perfectly. In CMOS, bootup priority set to 1)Floppy, 2)CDROM, 3)Disabled, Other Boot Dev. also disabled.
If ANY HD is in IDE Pullout, system tries to BOOT from that device and fails boot. Removing HD from pullout, boots fine.
Called MSI Tech Support (I LOVE MSI!), The Man said, "Change 1st Boot Device to SCSI". Now boots fine, with or without HD in pullout.
Just thought you'd want to know.

all addon ide controllers and raid is called scsi.
also alot of sata is called scsi too.

Elements 12 "Copy/Move to Removable Drive"

Reference case # 185684196, phone support given last year, the problem persists. In Elements 12, on my desktop PC (Windows 7, 64 bit) - I import photo files into the organizer, from camera card (RAW files, Nikon), THEN use the "Copy/Move to Removable Drive" function to move these files to a external hard drive (RAID 1 configuration) for permanent storage. When I run this process, it initially moves the files to the destination drive -- then a dialogue asks (approximately): are you sure you want to delete these files? (from the desktop drive) -- I click "yes" -- a progress bar runs -- and near completion, the process fails "Elements Organizer - An error occurred while reading files or writing files to disc. The disc may be full or there may be a problem with the source media." In fact, there is a great amount of disc space available at the destination drive. My wife and I use (for many years) this program for semi-professional purpose. It is CRITICAL to avoid any corruption -- the indexing / connection between the organizer thumbnail reference images and the externally stored image files MUST be properly maintained. What is causing this error message, what must be done to resolve the issue? I couple of times, when this has occurred, I went to the storage drive, manually deleted the just-imported files, ran the process again -- and, on this 2nd attempt, the process completed successfully. Obviously, this is not a long-term solution, nor a proper procedure -- and I always worry some sort of corruption may be introduced -- so, please advise the correct solution. Also -- I have been advised, and do practice, not allowing the catalogue to grow beyond 5,000 images (I then start a new catalogue). With the current, large batch of photos I'm importing (over 300 images), I'm also getting an "advice" message to back up the catalogue -- something I think I will do, to a different external drive, to have redundancy beyond even the present RAID 1 storage - however, this in no way solves the problem I'm asking you to help

I don't know how you managed to write in such a tiny font, but I managed to read your post and here is my take about your problems.
1 - What's the purpose of uploading from your card to your internal drive and not directly in your external NAS drive, since you don't keep them on your internal drive? You can use Windows to copy from your card to the NAS. You can even set the default location where the photo downloader in the Organizer sends your pictures. I don't have a NAS, but that works perfectly on an external USB drive.
2 - Reminder: the Organizer does not store picture files, only links to their real location (drive and path, that can be on an external drive). The catalog itself by default is on your boot drive, but it can be used on an external drive (not on a NAS for Macs).
3 - If you want to move files from your internal drive to the external one, you can simply use the drag and drop method in the left Folders panel. You can also 'export' selected files in the organizer to another drive.
4 - The advice to limit the catalog size to 5,000 items and split catalogs is stupid. There are happy users of 100,000 pictures, and splitting catalogs only creates organizing problems without any real advantage.
5 - About storing catalogs and photos on a network drive: http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshop-elements-faq.htm#_Storing_the_catalog
6 - What about your backup procedures? Do you use the built-in backup/restore feature in Elements? If you use another external backup, how do you backup catalogs?
Photoshop Elements 6/7/8 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

SATA Boot as Removable Drive ?

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