SATA drive won't boot

[concreteDonkey]

For a while I had a 40Gig ide drive with my os on and a 250gig SATA drive with my files/downloads etc..

The ide died the other day and so far I've not been able to get windows on the SATA drive.

Bad signs began when I booted using partitionmagic cd and it said the drive partition was "BAD".

I found an old 3gig ide drive and put that in, loaded windows to see what was going on. SATA drive is recognised fine in windows along with the 60gig of data on it. At first, the problem was obvious, the drive was one big logical NTFS in an extended partition, can't boot that. So I partitioned it to 33gig NTFS primary and the rest left as 200gig NTFS logical.

Fun starts here, with just the SATA drive and booting using a winxp disk, the message scanning your system hardware comes up, goes away and as soon as hdd light flashes, everything stops, screen is blank and key presses result in click noise from pc speaker.

Now if I put the 3gig ide back in and boot the winxp disk, all drives are recognised correctly. Only suspicious thing is, they're both seen as "Disk 0 on ide 0" at the winxp setup (blue screen where you choose where to install xp to), should they both be 0 0 like that? Anyway, if i then pick the D drive (thats the primary partition on the sata drive) for windows install, it formats the D but then puts all the setup files on C (the old 3 gig ide).

I have used partition magic to make sure the primary partition on the sata drive is "active" and I still get the same results.

Is there something really obvious I'm missing? I feel as though I've tried everything apart from deleting all partitions and starting afresh. This would be a loast resort as I REALLY don't want to sacrifice the 60GB of data.

Apologies for length of post
Thanks for reaching the end and please reply

Couple of facts:
1) My motherboard is ASUS A7N8X-XE
2)BIOS recognises the SATA drive fine and I can choose the boot order including the SATA drive.
3) PartitionMagic cd will no longer boot to PM, just errors to DOS prompt.

 

[mechBgon]

SATA for newbies In your instance, try

1) removing the IDE drive

2) making the necessary Serial ATA driver floppy diskette

3) starting Windows Setup from CD and hitting the F6 key on your keyboard to indicate that you've got a driver floppy

4) when Windows asks for the driver floppy later, put it in. See if Windows is now able to install to your smaller partition.


If it were me, I'd just chuck a new PATA drive in there so I wasn't using a PCI-based third-party disk controller for the boot drive.

 

[concreteDonkey]

Firstly, thanks for your reply.

I can't press F6 because it literally doesn't get that far. I press any key to boot from cd. A message along the lines of 'scanning hardware' shows. CD spins up a bit and screen goes blank, hdd light flashes, then screen just stays blank and I never get to the blue screen.

Surely the press F6 thing is for the RAID controller (which has the option to be non-RAID in my bios, which I have enabled). I've never had to use this option before, and when I do manage to reach the winxp installer (by having the PATA drive in and booting to cd) the SATA drive is listed with correct volumes and partitions. Therefore, I'm pretty sure I don't need any promise chip drivers.

It's looking more and more like I'll have to buy a PATA drive then?

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: concreteDonkey
Firstly, thanks for your reply.

I can't press F6 because it literally doesn't get that far. I press any key to boot from cd. A message along the lines of 'scanning hardware' shows. CD spins up a bit and screen goes blank, hdd light flashes, then screen just stays blank and I never get to the blue screen.

Surely the press F6 thing is for the RAID controller (which has the option to be non-RAID in my bios, which I have enabled). I've never had to use this option before, and when I do manage to reach the winxp installer (by having the PATA drive in and booting to cd) the SATA drive is listed with correct volumes and partitions. Therefore, I'm pretty sure I don't need any promise chip drivers.

It's looking more and more like I'll have to buy a PATA drive then?

If it gets boggled by having just the SATA drive in there, I speculate that it might be due to your Partition Magic work. At any rate, I'd be quite nervous about using Partition Magic on a drive that contained the only copy of my data, so I would run right out to BestBuy or someplace and grab me a PATA drive rather than trying any further monkeyshines on the SATA drive That'll overcome the installation hangups as a side effect too.

 

[concreteDonkey]

Yes, I've succumbed to the pressure and bought the smallest PATA drive in my local shop, 80 gig. Bit much just for an os drive, but if it gets the damn mess sorted, then I'm happy.

And it has.

So I'm happy