Can't boot from SATA drive?!

[newbie2181]

Hi,
I have recently just bought a new machine and built it. I bought a SATA drive with it. I had nightmares trying to install win XP on it because the XP install would not recognise the drive although the bios was. I started messing around and just pluged a normal ide drive in as well. The the install went through fine without any problems onto the SATA drive?!

Now when i try and turn the computer on it will only boot unless the normal ide hard drive is plugged in as well. I have read the documentation on the motherboard but there was only a page on setting SATA drives up and i didn't really understand it!!

The motheboard i am using is MSI 865G Neo2, with a Maxtor diamondmax plus 9.

Any help here would be great

Cheers

Dan

 

[Jwvanas]

When the windows installer start it says press F6 to install drivers, I hope there is a floppy with drivers delivered with your mobo, then load the drivers from that floppy and everything will be fine, windows XP doesn't got drivers for SATA, because SATA wasn't ready when Winxp was released.

 

[newbie2181]

i have managed to successfully install Win XP to that drive though it's just that i can't boot to it unless the ide drive is plugged in? lol

Cheers

Dan

 

[Marsh48]

Newbie, I had a similar problem with a Raptor (SATA)on C: drive and Maxtor 80Gb (IDE) on D: If you have the Soft Menu program for BIOS tweaking, you may need to check the boot order of the drives. Since I don't have the Soft Menu in front of me, I'll advise from memory. Go to Soft Menu, select the third option shown in yellow. On the page that opens, go down to hard drive priority" and open it. If the SATA drive is not in the top position, move the arrow button down to highlight the SATA drive, use the number pad "+" key to move it to the top. That should do it. Let me know if it works.

 

[newbie2181]

Cheers for that but i have sorted the problem now i flashed the bios and that seemed to do the trick not sure why but i'm not complaining! lol

Cheers for your help anyway

Dan