A7V8X: Booting Off SATA Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ignacy Sawicki
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I

Ignacy Sawicki

Hi,

I am running an ASUS A7V8X motherboard with the v14 BIOS and a built in Promise SATA comtroller.

I have just bought a 120Gb Seagate Barracuda SATA drive with the aim of moving there my boot
partition, which currently resides on an old PATA drive.

I installed the drive, went through the array-creation process, used Partition Magic to make a *primary*
partition taking up the whole SATA drive and copy my whole system partition there.

I cannot get the system to boot off the SATA drive, however. Both my old system partition and the SATA
partition are active according to Partition Magic, I have selected the SCSI/RAID boot device are the first in
the boot list (and have actually disabled all the other boot devices).

The computer keeps booting off the old PATA drive and moounts the SATA volume as drive E: it is
perfectly accessible and functional.

Does anyone have any idea?

Thanks,

Iggy
 
The problem you describe is apparently a fairly common one. I've got the
same one. There is much information but none of it is definitive. There is a
bunch of stuff on the MSN knowledge base. The trick is apparently (and I
haven't tried it yet) to clone your boot drive (including the MBR), un-name
your IDE drive, rename your sata drive to the name of your ide drive, change
your boot.ini file to point to the Sata drive, then shut down, disconnect
your ide drive and then power up. Some people say this works great others
say its looking for trouble. I'm just deciding whether or not to risk it .
Right now I'm sitting with a 160Gig drive that's just making hot air.
If you try it as suggested or something else you come up with keep good
notes and let the world know what happened. I'm sure there's a lot of people
looking for an answer to the same problem.
Ignacy Sawicki said:
Hi,

I am running an ASUS A7V8X motherboard with the v14 BIOS and a built in Promise SATA comtroller.

I have just bought a 120Gb Seagate Barracuda SATA drive with the aim of moving there my boot
partition, which currently resides on an old PATA drive.

I installed the drive, went through the array-creation process, used
Click to expand...
Partition Magic to make a *primary*
partition taking up the whole SATA drive and copy my whole system partition there.

I cannot get the system to boot off the SATA drive, however. Both my old system partition and the SATA
partition are active according to Partition Magic, I have selected the
Click to expand...
SCSI/RAID boot device are the first in
 
Dont use PM to partition, use the Win* cd - you dont say which version of
win.
You have to use either Ghost, or similar, to copy yr full sys including boot
rec. Or use the disk utility, if one was supplied with new disk.
I believe you will also have to do a repair install of Win, ensuring you F6
to install sata drivers from floppy, during the process. Disconect yr IDE
drive whilst undertaking this
 
I've played around some more, and here is the solution I have discovered:

When you format the SATA drive, you realise the the computer is actually booting off the SATA drive,
but then the bootblock there redirects it to boot off the old PATA drive. So it seems that partition Magic
is the cultprit for not adjusting the bootblock of the drive, or similar.

I have now used Acronis True Image to clone the drive and it seems to work fine. I suspect reinstalling
the MBR would also take care of this, but I couldn't get Windows XP rescue to do it, since it would not
recognise my SATA drive as having windows installed on it. Don't know if there is a utility that would let
you fix such a thing.

Iggy
 
Windows 98 SE:
fdisk /mbr
(not well documented).
You need to be careful though. If there is anything dicky about your
partition layout then you can lose things.
Sounds like you may have needed to set the partition as Active to boot from
it.
- Tim
 
I don't know, I'm just shooting in the air....

When you've made the drive image to the SATA drive, power down and
disconnect the PATA
Boot from the WinXP CD, have the SATA drivers ready on a floppy, and
indicate so when the Win setup so ask early in. Now go to the install,
select install on same partition and directory as the one already there.
This _SHOULD_ make a repair installation, with correct drivers, just like
when you change mobo on an existing XP install.....



--
Tumppi
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Ignacy Sawicki said:
I've played around some more, and here is the solution I have discovered:

When you format the SATA drive, you realise the the computer is actually booting off the SATA drive,
but then the bootblock there redirects it to boot off the old PATA drive.
Click to expand...
So it seems that partition Magic
is the cultprit for not adjusting the bootblock of the drive, or similar.

I have now used Acronis True Image to clone the drive and it seems to work fine. I suspect reinstalling
the MBR would also take care of this, but I couldn't get Windows XP rescue to do it, since it would not
recognise my SATA drive as having windows installed on it. Don't know if
Click to expand...
there is a utility that would let
 
I tried this, but it didn't help: even though I could make a FRESH
install on the SATA drive (and the XP installed complained that there is
another OS there), the installation was not detected for repair
purposes.

Works now though.

Iggy
 
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