Problem with SATA installation on Neo4 Platinum

[haohao]

Hi,

My Maxline III hard drive came in today. I have everything setup ok, Windows XP is successfully installed. I have one ATA100 80GB as my primary Master IDE drive before I started to use my new SATA drive.

The problem I encountered is that I can't boot my computer using the SATA drive as my primary boot drive. There were two copies of Windows XP (one in my ATA100 and one in the SATA). I can only start up the Windows in the SATA drive by setting the hard drive first priority to ATA.

Can anyone let me know what I did wrong, and how should I make my SATA drive as the primary or Master drive and be able to boot? I have no intention on using the RAID system on my SATA as well.

 

[haohao]

Can anyone help?

Thanks.

 

[Green Man]

It sounds like you still have an active partition on the IDE drive. When you start a computer it looks for an active partition for the boot information and it sounds like yours is finding the IDE drive.

 

[haohao]

I tried removing my ATA drive to reboot using the SATA but still cannot work. What I want is the SATA drive to work like common ATA drive but with the SATA features. I even installed the SATA driver in case it needs it. I have no problem seeing the drive in the windows, the problem is it cannot boot independently. The system keep asking for System or Windows installation disc and won't boot. Can anyone help me? Thank you.

Thanks replying, Green Man.

 

[Green Man]

The IDE drive held the active partition when you installed, so that's where Windows installation put ntldr, ntdetect, and boot.ini

You have two choices.

You could disconnect the IDE drive and reinstall on the SATA drive. Windows installation will make the SATA partition active. Then you can reconnect the IDE drive and everything will be fine.

The other option is to fix what you have. First you copy ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini from the root of the IDE drive to the root of the SATA drive. you'll need to show hidden files and system files to see them. Then go into disk management and right click the partition on your SATS drive and select make this partition active. When you reboot, go into BIOS and make it boot from the SATA hard drive.