SATA + IDE Problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter Brad
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Brad

I am having trouble with a hard drives on the system below. I just got a
replacement for the ATA100 45GB IBM drive which died, an ATA100 80GB
Hitachi. When I sent the IBM back, I also bought the 160GB Seagate SATA and
put a fresh install of WinXP Pro on as I lost it when the IBM died. Now I am
trying the get the Hitachi back onto the system and when ever it is
connected to ANY of the 4 on-board or 4 PCI ATA controller channels the
system will not boot, opting to either boot off CD or saying there is a boot
disk error depending on the boot sequence and options. The motherboard does
not have any option to boot from SATA, 'RAID' being the closest option which
still does not work. I know the jumpers are right (except trying 'disable
auto-spin up') and as soon as the drive is removed it boots fine off the
SATA. The drive is currently formatted for NTFS with a bit of data I grabbed
off a mates machine and was formatted using Partition Magic. Is there
something in the boot sector of the SATA drives which tells the system which
ATA drives to ignore, therefore if another is added it does not know to
ignore this drive and attempts to boot it like any normal ATA?

Cheers Guys & Gals
Brad

System is:
Asus A7N8X- Deluxe 2.0 | 2500+ AQXEA 0330RPMW | 1.70v vcore | 2200mhz 11x200
| 512mb PC3200 Geil 6-3-3-2.5 | Hercules Geforce 3 Ti200 | 230/500 | 160GB
Seagate 7200.7 SATA | 45GB IBM 45GXP ATA100 | 15GB IBM ATA100 | Enermax
Black Tower Case | 300x Enermax PSU
 
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Brad said:
I am having trouble with a hard drives on the system below. I just got a
replacement for the ATA100 45GB IBM drive which died, an ATA100 80GB
Hitachi. When I sent the IBM back, I also bought the 160GB Seagate SATA and
put a fresh install of WinXP Pro on as I lost it when the IBM died. Now I am
trying the get the Hitachi back onto the system and when ever it is
connected to ANY of the 4 on-board or 4 PCI ATA controller channels the
system will not boot, opting to either boot off CD or saying there is a boot
disk error depending on the boot sequence and options. The motherboard does
not have any option to boot from SATA, 'RAID' being the closest option which
still does not work. I know the jumpers are right (except trying 'disable
auto-spin up') and as soon as the drive is removed it boots fine off the
SATA. The drive is currently formatted for NTFS with a bit of data I grabbed
off a mates machine and was formatted using Partition Magic. Is there
something in the boot sector of the SATA drives which tells the system which
ATA drives to ignore, therefore if another is added it does not know to
ignore this drive and attempts to boot it like any normal ATA?
Click to expand...

No. Initial boot sequence is determined by the BIOS. It excludes
everything not detected, but then tries to boot everything
detected until one works (i.e. bootsector/MBR can be loaded,
regardless of whether there is something sensible in it).

There might be a way to modify the boot sequence to move the SATA
before the ATA, but that depends on the BIOS and you probably tried
changing it already. One thing which I can imagine, is that the
SATA controller has its own BIOS, which only activates if there is
no ATA disk. Would be strange though.

If you cannto move SATA/RAID higher than normal HDD in the boot
sequence, you have a problem there. Maybe you can remove/disable
"HDD" from the boot options?

Arno
 
eltan said:
Can another system read & access your Hitachi drive?
Click to expand...

"The drive is currently formatted for NTFS with a bit of data I grabbed
off a mates machine and was formatted using Partition Magic".
If not, your drive may be dead.
Click to expand...

What do *you* think, is it dead?
 
The drive is fine, I had to connected to my work PC when I got it at
lunch and formatted it fine and added some work files to it to take
home. It also worked on my mates 440BX mobo. I played with it further
last night...the hard drive that is :), and realised that the XP boot
partition on the SATA is on a logical drive at the 20GB point, being
the second partition in. Could this be the cause as Partition Magic
notes the 1024mb point being important for booting. It boots fine as
it is now though without the new drive connected *shrug*.

I think I might just bight the bullet and shift it into my server to
replace the 6.4GB in that and leave the main box with the 160 and 15.

Should I move the XP partition to the first parition on the drive
though?
 
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