Boot Issues from SATA HD with SATA PCI Card

[MAJ346BWAY]

I have a Gateway Performance 550 (PIII 550 MHz) with 256 MB RAM. OS is currently Win98SE. I have two Utra ATA hard drives attached to a Promise Ultra ATA-66 PCI controller.

I recently purchased a SIIG SATA Adapter PCI Card (Model 3112A) and a Seagate 160 MB SATA Hard Drive. What I want to do is partition the SATA drive to dual-boot Win98SE and WINXP Pro.

I've used the Seagate utilities to partition the SATA drive and to copy the contents of my current boot drive to the new partition on the SATA drive. After the copy process is complete, I change the boot drive order in the BIOS (which I flashed to the latest revision) then I boot from the new SATA drive. The system boots fine as long as I do not shut down.

When I attempt to shut down the PC from Windows 98SE, the system hangs. (I installed the shutdown patch from Microsoft some time ago. This is not an issue with the ATA drive currently used as the boot drive) When I force the system down and then power back up, I get a "general failure reading drive C" message, as if the partition is corrupt. This has happened twice. I suspect the SATA PCI adapter as the culprit. I read in another thread on this forum that SIIG cards are not that reliable. I have not yet contacted the vendor directly (their online support is virtually non-existent). Has anyone else experienced this problem? If the above was not clear enough, I will try and clarify. Thanks in advance for any assistance offered.

Regards,
Jeff

 

[ski]

This has happened twice."
What did you do?

 

[MAJ346BWAY]

Ok. Let me clarify: The system will boot from the SATA drive once, maybe twice, as long as I do not shut down Windows. When I do shut down Windows, the PC hangs on shutdown - to the point where I have to force the system down by pressing the power button. When I power the system back up after the forced shutdown, the SATA drive will no longer boot. "This has happened twice" means that I deleted the partition on the SATA drive, built a new partition, copied the PATA boot drive info to the SATA drive and set the SATA as the boot drive in BIOS. Then, the same sequence of events took place as mentioned above. That's what is meant by "This has happened twice".

 

[ski]

See if anything here helps:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=238096&product=w98