Added 3rd SATA HD. Now XP won't boot. Help!

[ClickCardo]

I originally had only 2 Maxtor SATA HDs on the A8V Deluxe onboard mobo Promise controller. I had them setup as 2 separate drives with the BIOS IDE option. I hit F6 during OS install and used a floppy with the non-RAID Promise drivers. It's a long story, but the OS successfully installed on the 2nd drive as drive D: in the operating system (XP SP1). Everything was working fine.

I just added a 3rd Maxtor SATA HD. This one was attached to the onboard mobo VIA controller. Booted and went into the BIOS. Now this new drive on the VIA controller showed as the 1st boot drive. So I switched back the Promise drive (D:?) with the OS on it as the boot drive and continued the boot process. Now I get the message:

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

I do not understand why it won't boot? The new drive was brand new and not formatted. Did adding it affect the drive letter sequence of the original 2 drives even though I set the drive with XP on it as the boot drive?

Can anybody tell me how to get this new drive to work with my old drives? I do not have a floppy with VIA SATA driivers on it. I do have the driver CD that came with the A8V, but it has RAID VIA drivers and I only have the one VIA drive and do not need/want RAID. I'm open to anyway I can get these 3 drives working together.

Thanks
CC

 

[micker377]

What is your boot order in BIOS?

 

[ClickCardo]

Slved problem. Was able to get VIA SATA RAID drivers on a floppy. Re-installed XP from CD and unpartioned all drives, then partioned/formatted VIA drive as C: and installed there. Everything now works fine.

All I have to do now is re-install all my apps and data. Yech!