Having SATA boot issues (after ghosting)

[The Sauce]

Cliffs:

Round 1
- Installed new SATA Drive (assigned as drive letter "J").
- Cloned old PATA drive to new SATA drive.
- Tried to boot off of SATA after BIOS config, etc.
- Drive recognized, Windows starts to load.
- SATA drive hangs at Windows startup because Windows can't automatically reconfigure drive letters for SATA and leaves it as "J" - it can't find setup files.

Round 2
- Repair Windows to get it to boot.
- Windows loads
- Can't change the drive letter on the system disk - stuck as "J". Installed apps not working.
- Stuck

Round 3
- Create second partition on the SATA drive (now two partitions J and K)
- Set second partition (K) as active.
- Clone the original PATA drive onto the second partition (K).
- Boot off the first partition (J).
- Re-letter the second partition (K) to "C"
- Delete the first partition(J) and resize existing space to one big partition for "C" drive.
- System boots.

A little trickier than that but that's cliffs. Hope this helps anyone else who might get stuck in the future.

Required progs: Norton Partition Magic 8.

Cheers

 

[V00D00]

Are you part of a domain, or is this a home computer? I've had very similar problems with the Security ID when we were ghosting computers on a domain.

The old windows is probably trying to load your old IDE drivers. Did you uninstall all the IDE controller drivers before you ghosted it?

If the old drive was on IDE and the new is on SATA, then obviously there are going to be problems.

 

[imported_Tick]

Yeah, we need to know what the old drive was.

 

[Arcanedeath]

you need to modify the boot.ini and the bios so the system can boot off the sata drive, w/out more info on your system (wether its a chipset sata controler or something on the PCI bus) we can't really tell you more.

 

[The Sauce]

Originally posted by: V00D00
Are you part of a domain, or is this a home computer? I've had very similar problems with the Security ID when we were ghosting computers on a domain.

The old windows is probably trying to load your old IDE drivers. Did you uninstall all the IDE controller drivers before you ghosted it?

If the old drive was on IDE and the new is on SATA, then obviously there are going to be problems.

1.) Home computer.
2.) No because the last thing I want to do is bork my original drive and Windows installation in case I can't get this one working. Uninstalling your IDE drivers seems like a good way to do just that.
3.) Yes, the old drive is IDE.

PS - If it was an IDE driver issue wouldn't it have booted in safe mode?

 

[The Sauce]

Originally posted by: Tick
Yeah, we need to know what the old drive was.

The old drive is IDE connected to plain old PATA.

 

[The Sauce]

Originally posted by: Arcanedeath
you need to modify the boot.ini and the bios so the system can boot off the sata drive, w/out more info on your system (wether its a chipset sata controler or something on the PCI bus) we can't really tell you more.

BIOS was modified and it will boot off the drive. Boots all the way to Windows welcome screen then stalls - likely because it is trying to find startup files on the /C drive and it is not there. Problem is I can't get into windows to change the drive letter on the new drive.

 

[The Sauce]

AAAGHH!!!!! Major frustration. After a web search on the subject I tried to do a repair on Windows. Reinstalled my old beat-up 3.5" drive, put the SATA drivers on it, hit F6 on setting up windows to load the drivers, reinstalled Windows. Windows boots up but now my boot time has INCREASED from 30 s to 120 s AND the drive is still recognized as "J" so I can't access any of my installed programs...kill...

 

[Arcanedeath]

My suggestion to you is to re ghost the pata drive to the sata one, just make sure your sata drivers are installed areadly, remove the pata drive from the system and go into and repair windows again, just make sure you never boot the system w/ the pata drive and the sata drive in the system at the same time or you'll hose one of the windows installs (like you found out)

 

[The Sauce]

Originally posted by: Arcanedeath
My suggestion to you is to re ghost the pata drive to the sata one, just make sure your sata drivers are installed areadly, remove the pata drive from the system and go into and repair windows again, just make sure you never boot the system w/ the pata drive and the sata drive in the system at the same time or you'll hose one of the windows installs (like you found out)

But in order to even clone the drive in the first place I have to format it and assign a drive letter...and that is th eproblem. Once the SATA drive has a letter other than "C" assigned it can't be used as the boot drive and keep using all of my installed apps. You see? Unless there is some way to force a drive letter change on the system disk...

Hmm...I wonder if I could do this with Partition magic...

 

[stevty2889]

I think partion magic will let you change the drive letter. Ghost to drive "J", then tell it to hide the partition on the drive that is currently "C", and then I believe it will allow you to change drive "J" to drive "C". I couldn't get it to work from the DOS boot disks, but have done it from within windows. Mine was drive "D", which I cloned to with partition magic, then hid drive "C" and changed "D" to "C".

 

[The Sauce]

Sounds like it would work but the last thing I want to do is rick screwing up my original drive. At the end of the day, regardless, I want a working system. And, I have another plan:

1.) Create new partition on the new drive (J). Now has 2 partitions J and K.
2.) Clone C AGAIN onto K.
3.) Boot with J and change K --> C
4.) Run PM and Delete J.

That should work. Will write back.

 

[The Sauce]

Ok so far this plan is working. I now have the SATA drive as C and it boots - still a bit quirky. I am resizing the active partition now. Convoluted, but so far so good.

 

[The Sauce]

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