Bought new SATA HD. Now won't run with IDE as slave.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Meznuraie
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Meznuraie

I had a 320GB hd which had 20GB space left. Since I only have one IDE plug on
my motherboard, I decided to buy a 640GB SATAII HD. I took out the IDE HD,
installed Windows XP Pro on the SATA one, and now I've been trying to boot
from that with the IDE HD as a slave so I can move all my files onto the new
HD, or even just use the 320GB as storage.

It will boot, occasionally, and go into windows - however, it sits with the
HD light on constantly. It takes over 10 minutes to open device manager,
occasionally it crashes if i open My Computer, it takes over 10 minutes to
open Control Panel, I can't open Internet Explorer, it just hangs there.
Every few minutes the CPU usage will spike, but other than that it does
nothing.

The computer runs with the IDE HD as Master with Slave Present as the jumper
settings, and boots into windows and runs perfectly fine like that.

I'm at my wits end as to how to fix this. Any suggestions? Thanks!
 
I suspect this is due to the disk signatures on both disks indicating them
to be drive C: to the OS.

To correct this you either need to edit the MBR of the IDE disk with a hex
editor, or else run FDISK /MBR from a windows 95/98 boot floppy, with only
the IDE disk connected.

Alternatively, if you can get into compmgmt.msc you may be able to assign a
new driveletter to the IDE disk's partition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
 
SATA drives are not treated as Master or Slaves.
So leave your IDE drives jumper at Master.

You may need to change the boot.ini file if you
have the need to dual boot between either the
SATA or IDE drive.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP on IDE drive" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP on SATA drive" /fastdetect

Enter your BIOS to set the boot order to the IDE drive first.
 
I have a similar situation but I have a Gigabyte mobo that allows me to
switch the order by which the BIOS can choose another boot hard drive device
w/of having to change any master/slave switches. I bought a 1.5TB Seagate
drive which tells me to partition and clone my existing OS to the new drive,
turn off the machine and unplug the old drive & allow the new drive to boot
up. I would review your mobo guide to see if this feature doesn't already
exist for you.

Tom J
 
Check your bios. Make sure the Sata drive is set to boot first. If there is second or third boot drive disable them. You're
disabling them from Booting, not operating. And disable "Boot from CD" or "Boot from Optical drive" too as well as any network or
USB or removable storage boot options. That worked well for me, using a crappy ECS AMD Sempron system. You want to eliminate all
possibilities so the system isn't looking all over the place for things to boot.

With prices so unbelievably low these days (DDR-2 800mhz x 4 slot motherboards for less than $50 used!) and 1gb ram sticks at about
$10 a gig for 800mhz ram, and older dual Core Intel CPU's less than $50 used (with many you can overclock on air past 3 ghz!) it
makes sense to upgrade to a motherboard with multi Sata inputs. And almost all still have a IDE plug as well for those occasional
times we need to backtrack to the 20th century.
 
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