Sata Drive Boot Order

[lilacwire]

I've been having crazy trouble with my computer lately. I had two SATA drives (80 gig Hitachi if that makes any difference) in a RAID 1 configuration on my computer. The first one decided to give me the "missing a file in windows/system/config/system" spiel and we ended up wiping it. For the past few months I have been working off the 2nd hard drive that thinks it's still RAIDed. Last night it gave me the same error.

I have been trying to boot from the "fresh" hard drive that we wiped and re-installed Windows XP Home on, but whenever I have both SATA drives plugged in, the computer will only load from the broken one. I've tried changing boot order in the bios, switching the cables' placement on the motherboard, and pretty much everything a "novice with some knowledge" might try to do. I'm at wit's end. How can I get my computer to load the clean drive so I have a working copy of windows so I can grab my files from the broken drive?

Thank you for ANY help.

Christine

 

[Harvey]

I noticed something similar when I was working on a friend's machine. We had to bounce between two SATA drives and alternate which one booted. Try this:

1. Unplug the drive you don't want to be the boot drive and boot it up.

2. Shut down the machine.

3. Plug the second drive in, and reboot.

On my friend's machine, that would switch the system to recognize the right drive. To go between drives, I had to repeat the process with only the drive I wanted to be the boot drive. I don't know why it works that way, but it does.

Hope that helps. If not, it may help if you tell us the make and model of you board.

 

[bwnv]

Easiest thing to do when loading win xp is only have one hard drive connected. Attach others after win is loaded.