adding SATA drive, not booting from Primary IDE!

[ame540]

hi.

Super basic problem, i cant imagine its something hard to fix.

1) i have a dell dimension 4600 with XP pro. Currently i boot from an 80 gig IDE drive (master).

2) BIOS is recognizing the drive, but it seems like its trying to boot from it because it says invalid disk (which is correct because its a freshly formatted drive w/ FAT.

How do i get my system to boot from the original IDE drive in the computer and not look for the SATA drive, as i just want to use this for storage, (im planning on converting it to NTFS)

Does the Dell BIOS force the boot drive to be SATA when IDE AND SATA are connected?

 

[paparazi]

ame540
It should be as easy as making sure the IDE hard drive is set first in the boot sequence.
It tends to be more difficult adding a boot SATA than IDE as traditionally most bios looks at the IDE channels before SATA.
Martin

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