Help Needed Installing Windows To New Hard Drive!

[vas]

Hi everybody! ;-)

I had Windows XP installed on an IDE HDD. Then i bought a new SATA HDD which i formatted and partioned using fdisk. On the second partition i copied all my documents from my IDE HDD.

Then i installed XP on the first partition of my new SATA HDD. I went to Bios, changed the booting order and to my surprise the system did not boot! So i formatted the IDE HDD and tried again. Still no booting!

Then i removed the IDE HDD and it booted! Whenever i plug it in back though does not boot. Any help on this???? I tried changing the jumbers on the IDE HDD as well as the SATA controllers. Still no luck!


P.S When formatting the IDE HDD shouldn't all the MBR and boot information go away???

 

[Alvin.C]

Look in your BIOS to see if there's an option to switch boot priority between PATA IDE and SATA drives...maybe...?

 

[vas]

First of all "Thank you very much for trying to help me!".

Unfortunately my bios is really simple. It does not have such an option. Apart from that in my bios settings the booting priorities are properly configured!

I still suspect that there is a boot sector or MBR left at my old disk and that confuses Windows Xp installation on the second drive. Something like that...maybe i could use some low-level formatting tools? If you reckon that is a good option are any such good tools you propose?

Still looking for an answer,

Thanks in advance!!!

 

[jrdwstfll]

jumpers possibly.. one can be set to master and the other slave... on the actual hard drive.. idk if that will do ne thing

 

[vas]

Thank you as well!

I tried all possible compinations of (Disk 1 i.e IDE HDD, Disk 2 i.e Sata HDD): (Master, Primary sata controller), (Master, Secondary sata controller), (Slave, Primary sata controller), (Slave, Secondary sata controller)!

As i asked before does formatting remove MBR and boot sector info?

Hope somebody can help me,

Thanks

 

[EricB]

the mbr doesn't go away by reinstalling xp. the ide is the first boot on the partition table.

try using fix mbr on your xp disc

 

[dlittlebear]

if that does not work, a boot floppy with fdisk on it should allow you to run the command fdisk <drive letter> /mbr

 

[vas]

Thank you...

I've tried "fix mbr" unsuccessfully though. Apart from that FDISK /MBR re-writes the partition executable code and the error messages in the partition sector, without affecting the partition table.

Additionally since i formatted the new SATA drive and i did a clean Windows XP instal, a new MBR for this drive has been created. So the problem is that when i plug my old drive in something tells Windows to look at the old disk's boot sector. But what is that??????

 

[vas]

To administrators and not only...

Shall i post my question to a different category? cos it doesn't seem that many people are familiar with this kind of problem

Thanks,

And if you know you are welcome to help ;-)

 

[KSoD]

I think the problem is this. You BIOS is set to recognize IDE before SATA. So everytime you put in your IDE Drive that is what boots first.

Check the boot path in your BIOS. I you will see taht IDE devices are noted before SATA. This is for the CD/DVD Drives to boot from them. So having a IDE HDD installed the PC recognizes that before the SATA even though it is formatted with no OS.

So unless you can change the boot order to have the SATA boot before the IDE then you are set. But then the problem comes in that you wont be able to boot from CD.