SATA and PATA Boot Issues

[Rebelcommander]

I just got a SATA drive to add onto the PATA i already was running. To set things up I unplugged the PATA drive and set windows up on the SATA drive, this worked fine. When I plugged the PATA drive back in, it booted instead of the SATA drive.
I looked @ the BIOS settings and it turns out that SATA is set as IDE channel 3 and my PATA drive is runnig on channel 0. Since it looks for the first drive w/ windows on it the PATA drive boots.
In my haste to fix this I wasn't thinking and went into windows on the PATA drive and in the registry changed the disk name from C: to somethign else. THis only succeded in making that drive fail when i boot into windows (Gets to right before the login screen and freezes).
I still have data on the PATA drive so formattign it is not an option, is there any way that i can kill whatever files make it boot (perhaps boot.ini or ntlder) from the recovery console or something?
Thanks

 

[Green Man]

You need to boot to the IDE drive and set your partition on the SATA drive as the System partition.

 

[stevty2889]

You should be able to set the hard drive boot priority in the BIOS, just set the SATA drive as the first boot drive..

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Rebelcommander
I just got a SATA drive to add onto the PATA i already was running. To set things up I unplugged the PATA drive and set windows up on the SATA drive, this worked fine. When I plugged the PATA drive back in, it booted instead of the SATA drive.
I looked @ the BIOS settings and it turns out that SATA is set as IDE channel 3 and my PATA drive is runnig on channel 0. Since it looks for the first drive w/ windows on it the PATA drive boots.
In my haste to fix this I wasn't thinking and went into windows on the PATA drive and in the registry changed the disk name from C: to somethign else. THis only succeded in making that drive fail when i boot into windows (Gets to right before the login screen and freezes).
I still have data on the PATA drive so formattign it is not an option, is there any way that i can kill whatever files make it boot (perhaps boot.ini or ntlder) from the recovery console or something?
Thanks

CAUTION: There's risk in doing this, but if you can't boot now from the PATA drive, this won't make things much worse... You'd still be able to mount the drive while booted from the SATA's Windows XP installation.

Changing the disk *name* won't have any impact on anything. Sounds like you changed the drive letter. If that's all you changed, you can fix this, although it sounds like some other things might be wrong too.

Boot with the SATA drive. (Change the boot order in BIOS if you must.) Go to the PATA's \windows\system32\config and back up the SAM, SOFTWARE, SECURITY, and SYSTEM files to a folder called BACKUP in that same directory.

Now go to regedt32 and click on hkey_local_machine, then click on Load Hive in the FILE menu. Navigate to the PATA's \windows\system32\config\system file, open it up, call it PATA_SYSTEM. Now click on Load Hive in the FILE menu again, navigate to the PATA's \windows\system32\config\software file, open it up, and call it PATA_SOFTWARE.

Now try first option #1, then option #2. Reboot between tries so you can test if each one worked.

1. In RegEdt32, go to HKLM, PATA_Software, Microsoft, Windows NT, CurrentVersion, Winlogon, UserInit and change it so it only says "userinit.exe," rather than "c:\windows\system32\userinit.exe,"
After making this change, click on the FILE menu and click UNLOAD HIVE, then reboot using the SATA drive to boot and see if the problem is fixed. If not, continue onward.

2. Go to the new PATA_SYSTEM 'folder' in regedt32, and look for the MOUNTEDDEVICES 'folder'. Delete the entire folder.
After making this change, click on the FILE menu and click UNLOAD HIVE, then reboot using the SATA drive to boot and see if the problem is fixed.

Make that backup first before doing all of this so you can easily go back if you'd like.