Windows will not boot from SATA

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

My old 40 GB IEEE hard drive is failing. I installed a new 200 GB SATA drive
into my computer and labeled it D:\ and used quick format to set the drive up
as NTFS.

I’m using a ASUS P4P-800E mother board with Windows XP Professional (SP2)
and have all of the current updates installed.

I used Norton Ghost 10 to create a mirror of the drive, which completed with
no errors. I then disconnected the old drive and rebooted the system. The new
drive will post and load drivers but stops at the blue windows welcome
screen. There are no error messages Windows just stops loading. I ran a
chkdsk /r /f and it found no errors.

The system has been scanned for viruses, also with negative results. I
cannot complete a new windows install on the new drive because my original
windows installation CD is an upgrade only, not a full install. The computer
came with Windows ME preinstalled and I do not have that original media.

Thank you in advance….
 
My old 40 GB IEEE hard drive is failing. I installed a new 200 GB SATA drive
into my computer and labeled it D:\ and used quick format to set the drive up
as NTFS.

Iâm using a ASUS P4P-800E mother board with Windows XP Professional (SP2)
and have all of the current updates installed.

I used Norton Ghost 10 to create a mirror of the drive, which completed with
no errors. I then disconnected the old drive and rebooted the system. The new
drive will post and load drivers but stops at the blue windows welcome
screen. There are no error messages Windows just stops loading. I ran a
chkdsk /r /f and it found no errors.

The system has been scanned for viruses, also with negative results. I
cannot complete a new windows install on the new drive because my original
windows installation CD is an upgrade only, not a full install. The computer
came with Windows ME preinstalled and I do not have that original media.

Thank you in advanceâ¦.
Click to expand...

You need to install the SATA drivers during the install process. You might
need to install the SATA onto your "old" installed hard drive and then Ghost
it to the new drive.

If you still can not get it to but, you will need to do a repair install on
the new drive. The upgrade CD should let you do this. If not, you can look
around to see if you you can "borrow" a true Windows 98/ME install CD, just
for the install process.
 
I have searched Microsoft for SATA drivers, but no clear instance on where to
get the drivers. Where should I go to get the current drivers. There was no
installiation CD with the SATA drive. I have revireed the BIOS settings and
the SATA drive is visiable and set up to be a bootable drive.

Thank you...
 
You need to install SATA drivers, and that probably means doing a "repair"
install of XP, hitting the F6 key when it asks about third-party drivers.
SATA is in the same category as SCSI and RAID. A full-retail upgrade XP CD
should be able to do this. However, the repair will effectively remove all
XP updates after the date of the XP CD. So, plan on spending some time
doing windows updates.

The drivers come from the motherboard maker. They are usualy on the
installation CD, but I suggest checking for the latest drivers on their
website. The drivers must be on a floppy for XP to use them. The XP
installer is too stupid to read them from a CD. You may also need a file
called "txtsetup.oem". I found this file in the root of the sub-directory
with all the SATA drivers for my ASUS P4S8X motherboard.

Finally, to boot from a hard drive it must be "active". That may not be the
exactly correct word, but copying 100% of the operating system to a new hard
drive does not, by itself, make the hard drive bootable. Many disk cloning
programs handle this automatically. Otherwise, you could try FDISK run from
a floppy, or the XP recovery console, run from the XP CD.

You may also have an identity crisis of sorts. XP remembers hard drives,
even if they are moved. If you ran XP with both the old and the new drives
attached, it may forever remember the old drive as C: and the new one as
something else. Most cloning program recommend doing the cloning below the
XP level, removing the old drive, then rebooting into XP with only the new
drive attached. That usually forces the new drive to be recognized as C:.
If you have a ZIP drive, I have heard that should be unplugged when doing
this sort of cloning.
 
Thank you all for the excellent information. I was able to install the
drivers, configure the drive and boot without an error.
 
Back
Top