Problems running both SATA and IDE hard drives

[TheMainer]

I currently have Windows XP installed on my SATA drive and all is working well with that. I also have an IDE drive which the power is not currently connected. The reason for this is that as soon as my IDE is connected and has power, the system tries to boot from IDE drive instead of my SATA drive which has windows. How do I get my system to boot from my SATA drive?? I just want to use the IDE drive as storage.

Thanks in advance for your help and suggestions.

 

[TheMainer]

Another thing which might help in debugging the problem is how I ran into this problem. Originally, I was using my IDE hard drive as the master, while I waited for my RMA'ed SATA drive to come in. Once it arrived, I wanted my SATA drive to be the master, and the IDE to be the slave. What is telling the CPU to boot from my IDE drive instead of the SATA drive and how can I fix it?

 

[Frank4d]

Some MOBOs have a BIOS setting to take care of the problem. What is your MOBO model?

 

[DragonQ0105]

Plug both drives in, and boot the PC using a Windows98SE Boot Floppy. These floppies can be made using images from

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~huey/Downloads/boot98se.exe.

After booting using this floppy, use "FDisk" (type 'fdisk' in the command prompt). In FDisk, make sure the prtition on the IDE Drive is NOT set to "active".

 

[paparazi]

TheMainer
Motherboards always give boot priority to the older ATA interface sometimes even when they are removed from the boot order "strange"
As others have said, the easiest way around this is remove Windows from your older drive (so it is no longer bootable)

Martin

We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[TheMainer]

What I did yesterday morning after posting was boot from an XP cd, delete all partitions, and then reinstall windows. I then reinstalled windows. As of right now, I am having a hard time telling what is going on and how things turned out. From booting and running applications, I feel like everything is still running on the IDE drive (speedwise). When I go into the Disk Manager, it shows my two drives as this:
Volume Layout Type FS Status

C: Partition Basic NTFS Healthy(Boot)
D: Partition Basic NTFS Healthy(System)

I am not sure what the (Boot) and (System) is referring too. Everything I have so far is installed on the C: drive. I tried creating the Win98 Boot disk as suggested, and it would not let me change which disk was active. I am running an ABIT AV8 MOBO. As of right now everything is running well, so I probably will not touch it. Thanks for all your help and suggestions.

 

[paparazi]

OK, so when you deleted all partitions and reinstalled Windows you should have pointed the install towards the SATA drive.
You would have had a window showing both the drives represented as one partition per drive (if thats what you decided) the differant drives would have been recognisable by their respective sizes (assuming they are of differant capacity)
As I said earlier Windows does favour the original ATA drive and treats the SATA as an addon so will naturally install on the ATA drive by default.

If both of these drives are modern then there isn't much differance in performance (don't let the interface speed fool you) just because the SATA is 150 and the ATA possibly only 100 doesn't make the SATA 50% quicker, the differance is only a few percent.

Martin


We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.