Removed IDE storage drive, now can't boot off my Raptor

[BrokenVisage]

For the longest time I've had my 37GB Raptor be the boot drive of my gaming machine, now that I'm getting ready to RAID a pair of Seagate 320GB's I decided to remove the IDE drive that stores all my games and stuff last night to make room for them. Except now I can't boot at all! After the BIOS screen I get a "BOOT DISK FAILURE: Please insert a system disk and reboot" and can't go any further.

I went into BIOS to see if it even detects the Raptor and I can see it as the Thrid IDE Master there. For the boot sequence I made sure Hard Disk was first, and since there's only one HDD now the Raptor is the first and only HDD in the disk boot sequence.

That's all I can figure out really, I have noticed that when I enable RAID in BIOS for certain channels that the HDD can "dissapear" from being detected. But I just disabled those for now and it still won't boot even after being re-detected.

Is booting from a SATA drive really this hard to figure out? I originally had Windows on the IDE drive, but weeks ago I took it off and edited the boot.ini so that it knows there's only one Windows now.

The backup plan I'm starting to come up with is to install Windows on the RAID array once I get that setup and try to figure things out in Windows. Can any of you guys help me out with this or offer your opinion on what to try next? Thanks.

 

[Lord Evermore]

If you installed Windows with a formatted drive ahead of the Raptor drive in the chain (since your Raptor was set up as 3rd Master, I presume your other drive was 1st), then Windows actually puts information on the first drive that points the system to the raptor to actually boot. If you remove that first drive, the system no longer knows where the boot partition is located. I'm pretty sure this is what has happened. If the IDE had not been formatted when you installed Windows, I don't think it would have done this, as the first usable partition would have been on the raptor (however it may still have used the master boot record on the IDE, I can't recall at the moment).

You can perhaps use the Recovery Console to fix this. Do a search for information about fixing the master boot record and replacing a boot.ini file. I think that should get you started at least.

You can probably also do a Repair Install, which would save your data and programs, but would restore the Windows installation to a new-install state so you'd have to update drivers and Windows Update all over again. There's definitely an easier way to fix this problem.

 

[BrokenVisage]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
If you installed Windows with a formatted drive ahead of the Raptor drive in the chain (since your Raptor was set up as 3rd Master, I presume your other drive was 1st), then Windows actually puts information on the first drive that points the system to the raptor to actually boot. If you remove that first drive, the system no longer knows where the boot partition is located. I'm pretty sure this is what has happened. If the IDE had not been formatted when you installed Windows, I don't think it would have done this, as the first usable partition would have been on the raptor (however it may still have used the master boot record on the IDE, I can't recall at the moment).

You can perhaps use the Recovery Console to fix this. Do a search for information about fixing the master boot record and replacing a boot.ini file. I think that should get you started at least.

You can probably also do a Repair Install, which would save your data and programs, but would restore the Windows installation to a new-install state so you'd have to update drivers and Windows Update all over again. There's definitely an easier way to fix this problem.

Thanks for the thoughts, I have since researched this more and have come to the same conclusion about trying to fix the MBR. I also figured the IDE drive had some information as well so maybe I'll just plug it back in for now just to get it booted up, but first I'll try to repair the MBR so maybe it will just trick itself into booting from the Raptor once again.

Yes the other drive was once the Windows partition, after which I got my Raptor and turned that into the new Windows boot drive and just had 2 Windows to choose from while booting for a while. But even though the Raptor was the last drive to install Windows on you still think it's looking for information on the IDE?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Yes, it always uses the first available drive as the boot disk. Your Raptor drive I think won't even have the ntldr (NT loader) file on it, let alone boot.ini. Those always get put onto the first available partition. That's why when you dual-boot with Win98, you install Win98 first (so it doesn't overwrite the XP boot record), and then install XP, the boot.ini and ntldr files get places on the 9x partition. It's just some weird limitation holdover.


This may be all you need. You may also need to use the fixboot command, and will need to copy some files like ntldr and ntdetect.com. http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=318728

 

[BrokenVisage]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Yes, it always uses the first available drive as the boot disk. Your Raptor drive I think won't even have the ntldr (NT loader) file on it, let alone boot.ini. Those always get put onto the first available partition. That's why when you dual-boot with Win98, you install Win98 first (so it doesn't overwrite the XP boot record), and then install XP, the boot.ini and ntldr files get places on the 9x partition. It's just some weird limitation holdover.


This may be all you need. You may also need to use the fixboot command, and will need to copy some files like ntldr and ntdetect.com. http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=318728

Great, thanks a million Lord, I'm at work right now so I'll try this when I get home tonite.