HDD and Booting Problems

[imported_blip]

A couple of weeks ago, one of my 2 IDE HDD's started clicking and booting was sloooow. So, I got a WD SATA 640GB HDD, and after a couple of days of playing around with drivers, BIOS, Win XP install disc, I was able to get XP installed and running on the SATA drive. It would still ask me which XP install I wanted to run during boot-up, but more on that later.

This past weekend, after I had moved pretty much everything I need from the old drives, I decided to remove them from the system, and put them in USB enclosures in case I needed something in the future. I shut down, removed them, went into the BIOS, and told it to boot only from the SATA drive. I booted up, and...it tried to boot from CD, told me there was a failure, and to insert the system disc...

I then played around with different configs of slave/master between the 2 IDE's and my DVD drive. Nothing worked until I went back to the original config. For some reason, I even had to switch the 2 IDE's back to the "secondary" IDE port and put the DVD in the "primary" port. I was then at least able to get back into windows. I still get prompted to choose which XP install I want to run. And the IDE checking part of bootup takes a while (with clicking) and I get the message: "Secondary IDE channel no 80 conductor cable installed". I have no idea what that's about.

So how do I remove the IDE drives without confusing my system completely?
Why doesn't it just look to the SATA drive when there are no IDE drives and boot from there?
Am I missing something?

Thanks in advance for all the help! Just let me know if you need more info

 

[Laputa]

Likely your boot.ini file and the ldr files were on the drive that that was removed and not on the new SATA drive. Should had removed all the drives and install the newer SATA drive by itself and then move the files over. You may need to reinstall

 

[imported_blip]

Will I need to do a whole new windows install on the SATA drive? Wipe it first? And then pull the IDE's, go through the SATA install, and then I can put the IDE's back on if I need to transfer stuff? Is there a way to transfer the boot.ini and ldr files from the IDE to SATA?

the drive that is dying is not the one with the XP install, so I thought I should be able to pull that one out with no problem. Is there a way to skip the step during boot up when it asks me which XP install to run, and just have it default to one or the other?

Thanks!

 

[KGB]

First, pull all HDDs except for your SATA, boot to your XP disk and try a repair install.

This should fix you up. Then reconnect your other HDDs.

 

[imported_blip]

Thanks! I'll try a repair install later today. Once I reconnect my other HDD's, will it still ask where to boot from? Do I need to remove something from the IDE drive that has XP installed so it doesn't ask?

Thanks again...