My mate has SATA drive problems - help?

[RageMatrix]

My mate has drive problems with SATA drives, something I'm not familiar with - can anyone help?

I will swerve round the reasons why I did these things and keep it to bullet points to avoid boring panst of you!

Sequence of events causing error.
1 Operating System installed on IDE Hard driver (Jumper setting Cable select) which worked fine. Did not have SATA drive in PC at all.
2 Got SATA HDD and installed fresh OS onto that. This also worked fine. (IDE Drive still present and still containing old O/S- my intention being to back up from one to other then format drive)
3. I now want to get rid of the operating sys on the SATA and go back to the PC booting into the original OS on the IDE drive. (Keeping the SATA as secondary storage)

What I did:
Formatted the SATA drive NTFS (Quick) via windows to remove all trace of O/S

The Symptoms.
- The PC BIOS seems to only want to boot from the SATA drive by default despite the fact it doesn't have any O/S on it
- I get a really brief (like 1 second) screen come up during boot which advises that I have two Windows XP Professionals installed and which do I want to boot from. If I am really quick I can hit the down arrow and choose the drive which actually does have an os on it.
- If I am too slow the BIOS tries to boot the SATA and tells me it is missing a certain .dll (which of course is not on there as there is no OS).

What I have tried.
1. Messing with BIOS which appears to have a perfectly useful function allowing you to choose the order of boot within HDDs (this is different from the boot order and would appear to be tailor made for what I am wanting to do) however when I change it to specify the IDE drive over the SATA I get the same symptoms.
2, Resetting bios to failsafe settings. (no effect)
3. Screwing with which SATA plug (there are 4) I am using on the motherboard. (no effect)
4. Changing jumper settings on IDE drive from Cable Select to Master. (not only does this not stop it trying to boot the SATA drive but also results in NTDLR is missing, i assume because the IDE drive is then not recognised at all)
5. Taking out the SATA hard drive and putting it on the desk during boot. (PC still tries to boot from it)

I think there is something in BIOS which has become utterly convinced that I would only ever want to boot from the SATA.

If there is anything you can think of I would be very greatful as I cannot think of a way around this.

If not I shall just have to oversee any boot and hit the switch from drive to drive sharpish, (which will be dull).

Anyone know anything about this? Mate in need and all that.

[Dio]

Does it still spanner up like this if the SATA drive's unplugged?

[t0ne]

Dunno, but while he's trying to sort it out get him to modify boot.ini to boot from the right disk to save him having to jump in when booting.

[piku]

Does it still spanner up like this if the SATA drive's unplugged?

Yeah, see point "5" of things he's tried. Cleverly the PC tries to boot off the disconnected drive, which is clever.

If the BIOS is all confused, do a reset to defaults. If he's farted around in the BIOS to tweak stuff, make sure he writes those settings down first.

Oh yeah, if he's quick, does the SATA controller have its own BIOS to fiddle in? One of my machines has SATA and after the BIOS has done the POST the BIOS for the SATA controller pops a message up for about half a second telling me to press a key combination to configure that.

[Tael]

Sounds like you'll need to delete the first entry from "boot.ini" so it has no choice but to load the other one. At a command prompt, this should do the trick:

Code: Select all

bootcfg /delete /ID1

[Kronos]

Sounds like you'll need to delete the first entry from "boot.ini" so it has no choice but to load the other one. At a command prompt, this should do the trick:

Code: Select all

bootcfg /delete /ID1

Assuming this is XP/2000 yes as others have said thats the fellow, if the boot menu comes up and works for 2nd OS install then when he put the OS on the SATA drive AFTER it was already present on the IDE drive as a dual boot system then it has changed the settings on the IDE drive to tell it it is no longer the only/primary OS and the boot process is controlled via the second OS installed via the SATA drive. REM out the first entry using notepad in boot.ini (hidden file so may need to change folder options at the root of the drive to see it, and back it up!). Bios wouldn't really affect it it's simply the OS loader.

[Nerdsville]

It's not the BIOS, the PC is booting onto the IDE drive but because it has had two installs the Windows boot sequence (on the IDE drive) is giving you the option to choose either installs.

If you can boot into the working operating system, go in the control panel and in the

system->advanced->startup and recovery

select the correct 'default' operating system and increase the timeout.

[Dungeon-Dave]

What I did:
Formatted the SATA drive NTFS (Quick) via windows to remove all trace of O/S

Formatting may blatt the content but not touch the MBR, which will still contain a signature to say it contains a bootable OS. I think you need to scrub this using the FDISK command or so.

[RageMatrix]

Thanks everyone - I've passed on the link to this thread to my mate and I guess he'll get back to me if it still doesn't work, but I'm pretty confident that the solutions provided will help.

Thanks!