Having trouble setting up SATA-II hard disk on an Abit AI7...

defender

defender

defender

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Okay, got the Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA-II disk today and hooked it up to my system before booting from an Windows XP CD and partioning/formatting the drive and installing the OS. So far, so good!

Btw, at the same time I had another ATA drive hooked up which I was previously booting from. However, my goal now is to have the Seagate as my system disk which I boot from.

So Windows is installed, I restart the computer and I get into Windows and everything's just fine. However, I notice that the disk configuration seems messy as I have to choose which OS to load, the new installation on the new disk or the previous installation on the other disk. And I also notice that the new disk is assigned the drive letter F where C is my old hard disk and D and E are my CD-RW/DVD drives.

I then decided to switch off the PC, unplug the ATA hard drive and keep just the new SATA hard drive plugged in and see if I can boot from that directly. However, instead I get a "hard drive boot failure" message. I've been into the BIOS settings and everything seems okay there but I can't seem to boot from the SATA drive unless my other ATA drive is connected and then I have to choose which OS to load.

I'm using the latest BIOS update and it's detecting the drive fine but just isn't able to boot from it. For clarification, my specs are in the sig below. Can anyone help me here?
 
Can you boot to it with the ATA drive back in.

Might just be an issue with the Master Boot Record, if that works, you can re-write the Master Boot Record in msconfig by removing the drive you don't want to boot from any more.

Look for some guides on this though, its been ages since i had to do this.

Run > Msconfig > BOOT.INI

You'll see a list where it says something like this...

[bootl loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fast detect /NoExecute=OptIn

Yours should however look something like....

[bootl loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fast detect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fast detect /NoExecute=OptIn

Its pretty obvious which one is which, and you simply edit the boot.ini to not include the old drive..

DO NOT DO THIS WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT YOU ARE DOING!

Spend some time reading the guides on the net for doing this properly if you want to use this route. I'm not going to be responsible for lost data if you mess something up as a result of reading this.
 
Thanks for the advice mate. I'm aware I can do that, however, what I want to do is be able to boot off the SATA drive.

I know when I booted of the XP CD I had to install the SATA drivers off a disk that came with the motherboard. Perhaps I need to install them somehow so that the BIOS can boot from the drive? But then again it can recognise it fine.

I've just made a boot up floppy disk with Seagate's DiscWizard software on it and will see what that tells me. I don't really want to reformat and reinstall Windows again though, unless I really have to.

Anyone got any other ideas?
 
If you installed windows on it already, you shouldnt need to do it again.

My guess was there was a problem with the missing the drive because the MBR was written with 2 drives present, like i said, plonk the other drive in and see if it works again.
 
defender said:
Thanks for the advice mate. I'm aware I can do that, however, what I want to do is be able to boot off the SATA drive.
Click to expand...

He isnt saying you must boot off of the drive you put back in, hes just saying that to boot off of the SATA drive you must have the first drive in the machine. Try doing as he said, and when you've removed its entry from the MBR try booting with just the SATA drive...
 
Ok, just booted up with the original disk in as well as the new disk. I removed the entry from boot.ini of the original Windows installation and restarted the computer with just the new disk but the same "hard drive failure" error returned.

Here's something I noticed...

If I boot into the new installation of Windows on the new HDD it's assigned to the letter F. Whereas, if I boot into the previous Windows installation on the original HDD it's assigned the letter D.

Okay, I think I need some clarification here. When I have both HDDs connected everything works, but is that because the computer is booting from the original disk and then, if I choose, loading the Windows installation which is on the new disk?

What I want to figure out is how I can set up the new drive as my system disk and boot from that. You'd think it'll be as simple as changing a setting in the BIOS but I can't seem to figure it out.
 
Thats because when you installed windows the first time windows assigned your drive first, followed by the cd drives, once the 2nd was put it in, the letter D wasnt available, so it gets the first letter there after.

On the second install its reads the hard drives first, hence you get D. IDE HDD, Sata HDD, then CD drives.

Its all a matter of whats plugged in when windows first see the drives, they are assigned accordingly.
 
You make perfect sense mate, if the case was the other way around. But the drive letters are the opposite of what you described. It's in the first installation that the disk gets assigned a D. But that's not a big deal!

I guess no-one knows why I'm getting hard disk failure when I try to boot from the SATA disk? I took a look at Seagate's DiscWizard but all it seems to do is create a new partition and format as well as a few other odd jobs.

To clarify, I can access and boot from my SATA HDD so long as the original hard disk is in there, but if it's just the SATA drive then it's gives a hard drive boot failure message when trying to boot-up.
 
Check the bios for something like ' Bootable Addin Devices '

If the IDE drive is present it may have a MBR for the sata device so it doesnt need the bios to point at the sata drive.

Where as when its independant it will go with what the bios tells it to read first, in which case may not be the sata drive.
 
In the BIOS, I have the Bootable Add-In Device set to OnChip SATA RAID and have the Bootable Add-In Device set to the first priority too.

I have a hunch the reason I can't boot from just the SATA drive is because when I installed Windows the original IDE drive was still connected, even though I installed to the new HDD.

If I were to reinstall (is reformat necessary?) Windows with only the SATA drive connected do you guys think that would solve this? Would clearing the CMOS also help in starting from scratch?

If that works, I can then hook up the original hard disk later once I'm ready to start restoring my backups.
 
Excellent news! I did as I said and started from scratch without the IDE drive connected. Unbelievably, it didn't even take a minute or two do a quick format which I didn't expect for a 320GB HDD!!

Now I can boot up from the Seagate without any problems. I guess I'm a happy bunny now. I can't believe it was as simple as just waiting until the OS was installed on the new drive before connecting the original IDE drive back up!

Thanks for the advice guys!
 
Quick format won't take long no matter big the drive is, its the data on the drive that takes time to format.

You could have a terrabyte size drive and it would format quickly if it was practicly empty.

Glad everything is working for you.... :D
 
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