Just added 2 SATA drives, now i cant boot!

[ame540]

Windows XP Pro
Dell PE400SC

I just added a pair of westen digital 200GB SATA hard drives into this "fileserving" computer, and now i cant boot. Windows displays this 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. Pleas check the windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information"

now i have exisiting IDE drives 1 is the OS drive and 2 has data on it. I wanted to add these SATA drives, the connect to the onboard SATA ports. Eventually they will be RAID1 (mirrored) but i will worry about that later, now i need to figure out why it wont boot up? in the BIOS, the SATA drives are set to AUTO.

the only thing that im worried about is that this intel chipset wont do raid so i might need a seperate controller card.

http://www.aaltonen.us/gallery/400sc/southbridge

any ideas?

 

[ski]

Does BIOS list the IDE HD(HD, HD-0, HD-1, etc.) as the 1st boot drive, or does it list SCSI first?

 

[ame540]

The boot sequence is
1. Floppy Drive
2. CD Rom
3. IDE drive

There arent any other options in the F2 Bios setup. Now maybe im not looking at another menu that i should be?

 

[wolluf]

the motherboard does have SATA support? Because if so, it should include option to boot from SATA - usually SCSI (and SCSI has been a standard entry on boot options for years!)

does it make any difference if you just connect one drive?

 

[ame540]

I just found out that this MB does support SATA drives, but the chipset in the 400sc (ICH5 (82810EB) southbridge) doesnt do RAID, etc. so im scrapping the whole thing, and just buying a SATA RAID controller that ill install in one of the PCI slots.

aparrently the newer PE 420sc does have onboard SATA RAID support, and hence the options in the bios. etc.