Very annoying SATA Problem

[BoB_DoG]

Okay, after screwing up my rig with Partitionmagic, and buying a Cuda 120gig SATA drive, I have reinstalled windows.

I am so pissed off with the booting up now. I installed windows on the SATA, and all was fine. I then copied all my crap I could restore from my buggered ATA over to the SATA. Fine.

I then wiped the ATA and THE (*BEEP*) WOULDNT BOOT.

Tried everything. I finally got it to work by putting an 8meg NTFS boot sector onto my old drive, and using that to boot from (after 2 reinstalls!)

Now I try to install SP1, and it says there isnt enough space on my C drive (the 8meg boot)..... AAARGH

I dont want to boot from ATA, then load windows from SATA, but I cant get it to work, and Its driving me nuts. I know that I could put a big partition on the ATA, and it *should* work, but thats another install, and if it doesnt then thats another one afterwards, and it still ties up both hard disks so I cant have one dedicated to Linux (the ATA was going to be changed to that)

Ive already had one XP CD shatter in my CD Writer, probably from overuse, so Im really at the end of my tether.

All I want is for someone who is running a SATA on an NF7-S to tell me the settings that they got it to work with.

It appears windows is very greedy, and needs the Primary IDE boot sector to load. Surely there must be some workaround. I have tried all the bios settings and XP settings that I can, to no avail.



If I were a religious person, I would really think that some cruel deity is testing me. Damn You!!

Please help


Edit By XTR: Removed the Swearing. Please remember this is a family forum and swear words used in this manner are not suitable.

[nichomach]

I'm running an NF7-S v1 with a Maxtor 80GB Serial ATA drive; I had to ensure that the first boot device in Advanced BIOS features was set to Serial ATA, that the Serial ATA controller was set to "Enabled" in the Integrated Peripherals section of the BIOS under Onboard PCI device, and also that I had the SATA controller driver disk handy. As soon as you start the install (basically, you get the "Press any key to boot from CD" message, then a black screen) you MUST be hitting F6

:edit - repeatedly if desired

so that you'll get prompted to install storage drivers before Windows does any autodetection to pick up the IDE controllers or whatever. Yes, there's a prompt later to do this if you don't do the F6, but the chances are that it WON'T WORK - the SATA controller must be the first disk controller that Windows sees. Once you've done that, before it does any device detection, you'll get a screen prompting you to press S for additional storage drivers and you'll then feed it the floppy (and it must be a floppy - no, you can't use a CD. No, a USB pen drive is no use.). You should then see the list of drivers from the floppy and be able to select the XP driver from that. Following that, setup will proceed normally, and when you're prompted for the install location, the SATA drive should be the first drive that shows up in the list of available drives to install to, and following installation, Windows'll boot quite happily.

Any help?

[BoB_DoG]

Cheers, thats a useful post, and its made me think. Im going to set the SATA to first boot again, and im gonna unplug my ATA disk too, then I'll plug it in again later. I'll let you know how I go.

Cheers

[BoB_DoG]

Haha... Fixed it. It was cos the first boot drive was the ATA, so winXP needed that partition to boot. I removed it, to be certain, installed with bios settings to SATA, and it worked... bloody good job too.

Cheers

[Steve]

If windows XP, during install, detects ATA drives it will insist on installing the boot files to them. If, however, you have no ATA drives, it will just deal with it and install on whatever SCSI or SATA drive you have chosen.

It is a strange trait - sometimes useful, sometimes a PITA.