Boot to 2nd HDD

[joepole]

I've got a brand new Dell 4600 that came from the factory with XP Pro loaded on a 80GB IDE drive. It's set up and everyting works great.

My problem is this:

I had an extra 120GB drive laying around that I wanted to add for extra storage. It is an SATA srive. When I install it the machine tries to boot to it. I tried installing it in the secondary and primary SATA slots, but nothing I can do will put the IDE drive ahead of the SATA drive in boot order.

I can, however, boot the system by selecting Dells "Boot Menu" (F12 at startup) and selecting the IDE drive. Everything works wonderfullt, the IDE boot drive is C, my CD burner is D, and the SATA drive is E, exactly what I want. This happens on both cold and warm boots.

My question is this:

Is there any kind of boot loader (that may not be the poper term) I can load onto the SATA drive that will tell the computer to boot to the boot partition on my IDE drive?

I don't mind having a menu pop up every time I boot (especially if I can set it to default to boot after a few seconds) but I don't want to have to sneak that F12 key in there every time I reboot.

I'm guessing my problem will be solved similar to the way someone would solve a dual-boot issue, except I'm only trying to boot to one OS.

 

[franklin97355]

What is the boot order in your BIOS?

 

[joepole]

1. Floppy
2. IDE Drive
3. CD

 

[PHPHT]

BIOS should also have a list of drives that it can boot from. Make sure only the 80GB system drive is listed, or at least listed first.

 

[joepole]

I'm looking at the screen now.

BIOS has 3 choices in the Boot Sequence settings:

1. Diskette Drive
2. Hard-Dick Drive C:
3. IDE CD-ROM Device

That is verbatim.

In the Drive Configuration Section it is detecting my drive just fine, corrcet name and size.

If I hit F12 on boot to go to the "Boot Menu" I can choose 3 relevant things:

1. SATA Primary - This will make it not boot
2. ATA Primary - It will boot great
3. Hard Disk Drive C: - It won't boot, same as #1.

 

[joepole]

Resolution:

After "talking" to somebody at Dell and a spending a few days translating what he said back into English, I have determined that there is no way to get a Dell 4600 to boot to an EIDE HDD is there is an SATA HDD present. I ended up wiping both drives and installing the OS on the SATA drive.

 

[bcastner]

joepole,

I just cannot accept this as the only solution. Perhaps it is true with the Dell Bios, but I am curious as to why only this solution would work, particularly as you wanted to use the 120 gig. drive as a slave.

 

[joepole]

I didn't want to use it as a slave, I wanted to use it as a primary on the SATA bus, but I wanted the SATA bus to be secondary to the EIDE bus in terms of boot order. I could do it manually every time I booted, but I wanted to do it automatically.

It is definitely a Dell BIOS issue, I found instructions for solving the issue on other mobo's and even on other Dell machines, but not for this one (the Dimension 4600)

And Dell Tech Support was worse than worthless. "We don't support dual drives" was their official statement. Huh?

For $400 I'm willing to live with few problems, though.

 

[wolluf]

I don't know if a boot manager (like my favourite,

http://www.boot-us.com)

loaded into the mbr on the SATA drive would have solved your problem (haven't yet tried boot-us or any other boot loader with SATA drive).