Need some major urgent help

[joe360]

Okay,

specs: AMD 3000+, 1Gb of ram, MSI K8T Neo, Ati 9600 XT, seagate 200GB

So my original setup i had 2 hard drives, the seagate and a maxtor. Both had XP. I decided to take out the old maxtor. Now windows wouldn't boot from just the seagate. It coulnd't detect a primary master. I played around in BIOS and screwed it up more . Now it starts up and i get to the boot menu where you see the ram check and whatnot, but it freezes there and i can't get into BIOS anymore. Anyway to undo the damage?

 

[mechBgon]

Unplug all drives from both power & data cables and see if it will complete a POST without drives attached, or not. You evidently have a working second computer, is it a desktop system that you can use to rescue data off the hard drives if necessary?

 

[joe360]

Okay, so i unpluged everything, resetted BIOS and all that. I got back to my previous setup. Maxtor which is the ATA drive is C: and Seagate which is the SATA is F:. How do i set the seagate as the master, so i can just unplug the maxtor. So the original error message i get just trying the booting the seagte, is "Boot failure, Insert BOOT diskette in a:"

 

[Bug]

Let me get this straight:
1) In your original setup, the Maxtor was set as the C:\ drive and the Seagate was set to be the F:\ drive. The Maxtor was presumably set to be the Master on the Primary IDE channel. The Seagate was either Slave on the Primary IDE channel, or set to Master/Slave on the Secondary IDE.
2) You removed the Maxtor, and set the Seagate to be the Master on the Primary IDE channel.

If everything above is true, then with your original config intact, you should immediately back up your data. The next step is to either use some drive imaging tools like MaxBlast or re-install the OS on the Seagate, assuming you haven't already.

 

[joe360]

Originally posted by: Bug
Let me get this straight:
1) In your original setup, the Maxtor was set as the C:\ drive and the Seagate was set to be the F:\ drive. The Maxtor was presumably set to be the Master on the Primary IDE channel. The Seagate was either Slave on the Primary IDE channel, or set to Master/Slave on the Secondary IDE.
2) You removed the Maxtor, and set the Seagate to be the Master on the Primary IDE channel.

If everything above is true, then with your original config intact, you should immediately back up your data. The next step is to either use some drive imaging tools like MaxBlast or re-install the OS on the Seagate, assuming you haven't already.

Sorry forgot to mention something. The seagate was an SATA. But other than that yeah everything is pretty much right. So when I removed the maxtor and i get the error message, "Boot failure, Insert BOOT diskette in a:". But if i plug back everything, everything is okay again, i can use the maxtor or seagate. So basically all i want is to use the seagate as my only hdd.

 

[mechBgon]

Sounds like your boot record is on the Maxtor, hence the problem of booting without it. What I'd do, is back up your stuff to the Maxtor and then take it out of the system. Now vaporize the Windows installation that's on the SATA drive and reinstall Windows onto it while it's the only drive in the system, then reinstall your apps. Now you can throw the Maxtor back in and pull stuff off of it as desired.

You'll probably need to go into the motherboard's BIOS and manually force it to boot from the SATA drive, because given a choice, they tend to want to boot from PATA when you add a PATA drive to the system.

If your WinXP is not at Service Pack 2 level right on the CD, then I'd also suggest saving the full SP2 installer onto the Maxtor and not letting the system get any sort of network connection until you've patched the fresh Windows installation to SP2 level.

 

[joe360]

This is what i have done so far:
1. Download drivers for an onboard SATA hdd from the MSI website(my motherboard)
2. Put drivers onto a floppy
3. Started Windows Setup and pressed F6 to enter into Raid or SCIS controller menu
4. Pressed 'S' to specify a drive
5. I asked for the floppy so i inserted the floppy and it seemed to add the drive (it returned me back to the main menu where it said it was gonna add an SATA hdd)
6. I continued the install process, and it brought me to the install/repair windows menu
7. I try to install windows and it give me a message saying that there it cannot continue cause there is no drive attached

What am i missing?

 

[joe360]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
Sounds like your boot record is on the Maxtor, hence the problem of booting without it. What I'd do, is back up your stuff to the Maxtor and then take it out of the system. Now vaporize the Windows installation that's on the SATA drive and reinstall Windows onto it while it's the only drive in the system, then reinstall your apps. Now you can throw the Maxtor back in and pull stuff off of it as desired.

You'll probably need to go into the motherboard's BIOS and manually force it to boot from the SATA drive, because given a choice, they tend to want to boot from PATA when you add a PATA drive to the system.

If your WinXP is not at Service Pack 2 level right on the CD, then I'd also suggest saving the full SP2 installer onto the Maxtor and not letting the system get any sort of network connection until you've patched the fresh Windows installation to SP2 level.

The only problem with re-installing windows on the sata, is that when i boot from the windows cd, and try to repair windows, it cannot find the sata drive