Help needed - Sata Drive

[Tall_Paul]

I'm trying to install a western digital caviar 250gb sata drive, the drive is working fine, I can access the files on the drive, bios can see the drive, and its identified at startup. I've used Data lifeguard (from WD) to transfer across files from the old drive to the new one (old drive is a 30gb ide drive) had some probs with that originally, but thats all fine now. however....it will not boot from the sata drive!! I 've changed boot drive priority in the bios, but every time it gets to 2nd screen of start up (before getting to the windows screen) and says "error loading OS" I've played about with the jumper positions, but no joy (and this shouldnt make a difference, 'cos new drive is sata!), can anyone help!!! MB is a Gigabyte GA-K8NS (nForce 3), with Athlon 64 3000, 1gb ram, running windows XP home SP2.

Any help appreciated, as I spent pretty much all of yesterday pulling my hair out!

Cheers
TP

>> Edited by Tall_Paul on Thursday 11th August 13:16

[docevi1]

Did you re-install windows or just use the original which you copied?

Windows XP could still be looking in the wrong place - when you install it in the first place you have to specify 3rd party drivers to get the SATA to work...

[malman]

Do you ever get the black and white bar at the bottom saying staring windows? If not then it could be the MBR is missing. Boot to recovery console from cd and fixmbr should sort that.

[malman]

Once it gets past the initial bootstrap, Stefan is right you have changed boot device type and Windows needs to know this. If your very lucky it will just work otherwise you will probably get a blue screen with "stop 7b inaccessable boot device"

There is an unsupported MS KB article about how to add the drivers manually so that you can boot from your new device type. If you get that far I'll try and dig it out .

[docevi1]

Oh, and Neil (malman) knows my (un)successfulness with my SATA drive

[malman]

Still working I hope

[docevi1]

flawlessly now that it's not needed.

I still can't figure out what was wrong, but still, have good backups nowadays!

[aldi]

The partition needs to be set 'active' to be bootable. How to do that depends on what you've got available in terms of boot disks/CD's. I would have thought that WD's utility would have done it for you to be honest.

Also some motherboard BIOS's can be funny about what they'l boot from when you've got a mix of IDE and SATA, try with just the SATA installed alone. Check the whole BIOS for relevant options, not just the boot orer bit.

[Tall_Paul]

Ok, thanks for the replies, I've now tried booting with just the sata drive attached, and it is not detected in the bios/startup...tried to to go into recovery console (via XP cd) but it states "there is no hard drive attached to you computer", did this again, and pressed F6 to load the sata drivers....nothing, the thing continued as normal!!! I don't have the sata driver on a floppy disc, only on cd, would this cause a problem?

Also the drive is showing as active in disc manager (if i boot thru the old disc)

Its the original windows that i want to use (i didn't want to re-install windows, as i'll have to re-setup my home network, and that was a pig of a job on its own!), and it doesn't get as far as the black & white bar with "starting windows"

Cheers

[trooperiziz]

I seem to remember having similar problems with my motherboard and SATA. It turned out there were 2 settings in the BIOS that I need to set to get the SATA drive recognised. One was the boot priority (that you have done) but there was another one to actually turn on the SATA part that was cunningly hidden under the RAID section.

[Nuggs]

Paul - sorry if this sounds a little elementary, I'm not exactly what you might call a computer wizard...

Have you tried booting from the CD that came with the SATA HDD? I'm pretty sure I had to set mine (Seagate Barracuda 160Gb) up like that before it would run...

[aldi]

You can download a manual for your motherboard from www.gigabyte.com.tw - thats got a section in it about what BIOS settings to use to boot from a SATA non-raided drive.

[Tall_Paul]

Thanks for the help guys, finally got it sorted!!! Woohoo!!

I flashed the bios, installed the drivers via floppy, thru the F6 bit, and found there was something wrong with my power connector, it would find both drives when they were connected, but if the ide drive was disconnected, there was no power to the sata drive...

swapped around the power connector, and hey presto!! it works...

at least i'll know what to do next time around!

Cheers
TP

>> Edited by Tall_Paul on Friday 12th August 12:38