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SATA Hard drive trouble

H

hube235

Golden Member
Ok. I just bought a SATA Hard drive from someone here on AT forums. The thing checked out fine, formatted fine and worked WITH my ATA hard drive very well. I managed to install WinXP and transfer everything I needed from my ATA HD to my SATA HD and now I'm planning to sell the ATA to my friend. He asked that I format it clean so I did just that. Now WinXP doesn't load from my SATA HD. I remember when I just formatted my SATA HD in Administrator tools/storage/disk management it said my ATA was the "(system)" drive and my SATA was the "(boot)" drive. I don't exactly know what those mean, but I think it has something to do with why I can't load up windows. I tried setting the boot priority in my BIOS to SATA, HDD-0, CD-ROM...didn't work. Then I tried SCSI, HDD-0, CDROM...still nothing. Then I tried to reinstal WinXP and nothing new happened. During the time that the SATA HD did work, whenever I started up the computer, it would ask me to load up winXP from which HD, and since both ran winxp, I had two identical options. Can anyone give a few pointers???

-Hubert
 
hmm, thanks. Oh, forgot to post the specs

Mobo: Abit NF7-S V. 2.0
Athlon mobile xp 2600
Maxtor 250 gb SATA
maxtor 120 gb ATA
(I guess these are the relavent specs needed to diagnose the problem)
 
Still no success. I'm pretty sure I updated my BIOS to the latest version. I installed the SATA drivers. I also had to use the disk containing the SATA drivers to have the winxp setup access the drive in the repair console. It also turns out that I tried installing Winxp into another directory, I can't seem to get rid of it within the repair console. Any other way of deleting it besides booting from another HDD, and deleting?
 
Have you tried doing a repair install? This seems to be a common problem when windows is installed to a SATA hard drive, with a PATA hard drive present in the system. It's always best to have all other drives disconnected when installing to a SATA drive.
 
MS logic: "Hmmm this guy just installed the entire operating system to this newly formatted larger capacity faster hard-drive...I'd better make the old one C:\".

Yeah installing XP/2000/etc is annoying if you forget to disconnect all the other drives. I didn't once and my beautiful new high capacity harddrive with a fresh system ended up being F:\ for the rest of its days. Everytime I installed something to my F:\, I could almost hear windows mocking me. Sorry you learned the hardway too =(.

MS just doesn't bother giving people advanced install options so I imagine this will still be a problem in Vista...
 
ah, finally got the thing up and running independantly. Now to reinstall/transfer all my crap to the new one. Thanks for all your support. And yes, microsoft has gotta allow people access to advance install options...
 
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