Booting Vista from IDE > SATA Adapter

[shaithis]

A friend of mine recently hassled me to give him a hand with a small hardware and software upgrade he was performing, as is usually the way with these things it ended up being a much bigger pain then it sounded

He has the ABit AB9 and had a 300GB SATA hard drive and IDE DVDRW running XP.

He wanted to install a larger HDD (using his old HDD as a removable drive) and Vista......It sounded way too easy........

So I take on this "easy favour" for him.....I did bring a SATA DVD with me as I know what Vista is like installi9ng from the JMicron controllers, although I wasn't prepared for the fact he had bought an IDE HDD....

After many attempts of trying to install Vista I gave up on running it off of the JMicron controller (bootloader not found on every reboot) and decided to grab an IDE>SATA adapter and run the drive off of the main ICH8R controller.

No matter what I did, I would always get bootloader not found on reboot. I made the partition active, booted XP off of the old drive and used VistaBootPro to install the vista bootloader to the new drive, I used the Vista repair too many times to count....

BOOTLOADER NOT FOUND

I left him in the state where the bootloader is on his old drive but vista is on the new drive, obviously this is far from ideal when he wants to use the second drive as a removable disk

Any ideas on what I missed? Is the IDE>SATA adapter causing issues with booting? (I can't figure out the logic of it causing an issue!) Would booting an IDE drive from the JMicron controller cause the same symptoms?

Completely baffled.

[acrobat]

I had a similar problem which I posted somewhere nearby here. With my problem, Vista just wouldn't boot off my SATA DVD drive, and to get it working, I had to enable AHCI in the bios. It then installed great, but I then suffered from a second hard disk that vanishes from time to time. To get that to stay up, I have to disable AHCI in the bios, but then the DVD drive stops working. So it's a pain for me. I need to find a more permanent solution soon, than just rebooting each time with AHCI on or off.