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A8n-SLI Premium boot troubles

K

Kalessian

Senior member
This is driving me nuts >_<

I have two disks, an IDE 120GB and a SATA 250GB. I installed WinXP x64 onto the SATA, and I had the 120GB purely as a storage drive with NTFS. After the install went fine, I couldn't boot off the SATA to reach my installed OS (invalid system disk bla bla), so I went into the BIOS and reset the SATA as the first hard disk and set hard disk as the 1st priority.

Still no go, but I got an idea, so I went back to CDROM-boot and WinXP x64 install started to run, saying "Press any key to boot CDROM." I didn't hit a key, and it switched to hard disk boot, and booted XP x64! Great. So I copied all my storage data to my SATA drive for temporary safekeeping, then tried to reformat the 120GB as a FAT32 drive(to make it a huge swap drive for Linux/Windows). Blah, WinXP doesn't do FAT32. So in goes my gentoo disk, I run fdisk /dev/hda, make the 120GB a FAT32 drive. Good. Tried to boot up again in WinXP x64 using the install disk trick, and this time it didn't work at all.

Now I know that I have a working OS on that drive, but it just won't boot. I was thinking of trying to use the repair console to fix the MBR? I don't know...

Bios revision is 1005.

Thanks a lot in advance.
 
Install Windows on the SATA drive without the 120GB in the system at all, then add it and reset the priority as you did before.

Handy bonus item: if you press the F8 key at the first Asus POST screen, it should stop at a boot-device-selector list once it's done with POST. Sometimes useful 🙂
 
Ahh, yes, I tried the F8 screen and chose the SATA device. Still no go. Is it possible that the boot sector went onto the 120GB drive(since windows saw that as C:\ ), and since I wiped it I don't have a working boot sector? Is that why you suggested to reinstall?

I am leary of reinstalling windows on that drive with everything on it, so I'll have to start up knoppix first and back it all up again.

I will try to unplug the IDE drive.
 
Originally posted by: Kalessian
Ahh, yes, I tried the F8 screen and chose the SATA device. Still no go. Is it possible that the boot sector went onto the 120GB drive(since windows saw that as C:\ ), and since I wiped it I don't have a working boot sector? Is that why you suggested to reinstall?
Click to expand...
Yeah, exactly my thoughts.

 
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