Problems booting from new SATA drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Paul Hurley
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Paul Hurley

I have a brand new Western Digital 120GB SATA drive. I have it
installed to a MSI 865PE Neo2 mobo, and I'm trying to install WinXP
Pro. (On this mobo I have a standard IDE drive booting and running XP
quite happily, but I disable this drive in the BIOS for the
installation.) When I boot from a floppy and install XP from the CD,
the DOS portion of the install (file copy, etc.) completes properly --
I don't have to install a special driver, or so it appears. The
problem occurs when the XP install wants to boot after the file copy,
when I get a missing boot record error. I'm pretty sure I have the
BIOS settings correct since the SATA drive is recognized and the
system does try to boot from it.

To try to get as simple a case as possible, I booted to DOS from a
Win98 recovery floppy and formatted the SATA drive with the copy
system files option. When I tried to boot from the SATA drive I got a
"missing operating system" error.

I've kind of hit a wall here, since everything else appears to be OK.

Suggestions?

Thanks
Paul
 
Paul Hurley said:
I have a brand new Western Digital 120GB SATA drive. I have it
installed to a MSI 865PE Neo2 mobo, and I'm trying to install WinXP
Pro. (On this mobo I have a standard IDE drive booting and running XP
quite happily, but I disable this drive in the BIOS for the
installation.) When I boot from a floppy and install XP from the CD,
the DOS portion of the install (file copy, etc.) completes properly --
I don't have to install a special driver, or so it appears. The
problem occurs when the XP install wants to boot after the file copy,
when I get a missing boot record error. I'm pretty sure I have the
BIOS settings correct since the SATA drive is recognized and the
system does try to boot from it.

To try to get as simple a case as possible, I booted to DOS from a
Win98 recovery floppy and formatted the SATA drive with the copy
system files option. When I tried to boot from the SATA drive I got a
"missing operating system" error.

I've kind of hit a wall here, since everything else appears to be OK.

Suggestions?

Thanks
Paul
----
Paul Hurley
Caliban Computing
http://www.Caliban.com/
Spam resistant return email address.
Click to expand...
What is Boot Order in BIOS? You need to set SATA. Have you RTFM?
MIke.
 
The boot order was correct, and I R'ed TFM but it wasn't much help.
Finally I physically disconnected the IDE devices I did not need and
booted from the XP CD, then on to the install. This also permitted me
to load the SATA driver from floppy via F6. Everything is now booting
and XP is loading properly.
 
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