New SATA drive won't boot!

  • Thread starter Deleted member 79192
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Deleted member 79192

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I just installed a new SATA drive and added it into my case while keeping the old PATA in so I could transfer data over. I installed Windows to the primary partition of the SATA and did my stuff and when I had all the data from the old drive transferred over I disconnected the ribbon and power cable to see if it will boot normally. It won't though. I get a "Disk Boot Error" message right after the POST screen. The weird thing is it boots fine. I've been rebooting a lot while setting up drivers and stuff. It's just when its the only drive hooked up that I get that issue. If I hook up the PATA drive too, I get two OS choices in the boot menu and I can boot to either my old or new.

Does anybody know why this is happening and how I can fix it? I don't want to have to be powering an unused hard drive and have it occupy drive letters for no reason.
 
Yes
You didnt change the boot drive in the CMOS so it now boots from the old IDE drive and loads windows off the new drive.

This can be a pig to fix properly so its best to boot with both drives again, copy your data back to the IDE drive.
Unplug the IDE drive so no more problems can occur and reinstall Windows.

When you plug the IDE drive in again, before booting, make sure your SATA drive is 1st in the boot order in the CMOS.
 
Crap. This is already my second reinstall of Windows since I started with the drive today. lol

Is there any way to fix this without going through all that? It will take a long time to transfer all the data back and I really don't feel like reinstalling Windows+drivers again. :(

note: by CMOS you mean the CMOS and not BIOS right? I thought I;d taken care of things by making sure the boot order was set up correctly with the SATA 1st in the BIOS before I even started. I guess that didn't work.
 
Wait... I partitioned my drive isolating Windows XP to the primary partition. Will I be able to get away with just reformatting the primary partition during setup and installing Windows XP (not having the move all the data off the other partitions and back onto them)?

EDIT: Scratch that. Windows setup can't interpret the individual partitions (yay 127gb limit. not). It looks like I'm going to have to go through with moving everything off and then back on. :(
 
CMOS is the memory the BIOS is stored in, yeah they are the same thing.

Windows NT based OS's map each controller and drive independantly.
They can be still read in the order the hardware is installed, independant of the BIOS setting.
I'm sure while installing Windows it sometimes reads directly rather than checking the BIOS for drive remappings.
This is why I now install Windows from a CD with only 1 drive in the system.

Seriously the path of least hassle is to reinstall Windows.
If you dont take that route, I wont have time to research and help you sort any issues, others may have time, your risk :)
If you do try and fix it, even when you think its fixed, at a later date it could do something strange and end up needing 2 drives again. Its not worth it.


Oh yes, forgot to mention, this can be important.
The time a partition on a drive is made can determine which drive letter it is given when installing Windows.
(this is from my own experience)

Say for example you have 2 partitions and use them as C:and D: in Windows.
You decide to reinstall Windows and delete the C: partition.
When you recreate the partition, it will be newer than the old D: partition.
This sometimes makes a Windows install think that the old partition should be drive C: and the new partition D: and labels them wrong.

To prevent this, delete all partitions and recreate them.
 
That's what I'm doing. The data is almost done transferring back onto the old drive. I'm just going to reinstall Windows and transfer it all back after. Thanks for the help. :) I was really at a loss earlier. This is the first time I've ever worked with SATA drives.

Btw I just realized I posted in the wrong forum. Sorry about that, guys. :p
 
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