Can't boot XP off new SATA drive

[Rebel1]

My present working configuration has two physical ATA drives. The master
is a WD 500GB drive partitioned at C:, E:, F:, H:, and I:. The slave is
a Seagate 160GB partitioned as D: and G:. (There are also two SATA
optical drives.)

I added a WD 1TB Caviar Blue SATA drive, partitioned into five. I
installed XP SP2, direct from a Microsoft CD, onto the partition (L
that will eventually become C: after I rearrange my system. (The Seagate
drive will be removed after transferring its files to the WE 500GB, with
new drive letters so there is no conflict with two C: partitions; in the
end, I'll still have two physical drives.)

My Asus M3A7-CM mobo recognizes the SATA drive, plugged into port 1, and
I've chosen the SATA setting. (The drive is capable of 6Gbps, but the
mobo only handles 3Gbps.) I'm able to install XP onto its L: partition.
But after telling the mobo to boot off the new drive, it refuses to do
so. I get this message:

"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware
configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk
hardware."

It makes no attempt to boot of the next hard drive in sequence, the
WD500GB I've been using without any problems; it just displays a black
screen with a blinking hyphen in the top left corner.

Device Manager lists the drive. The driver is dated 7/1/2001, but using
DM to search for a newer one didn't find any.

Windows Explorer recognizes the new drive and its partitions, so I'm not
sure if Windows XP SP2 needs special SATA drivers that I have to
download and install. Of course I can't upgrade to SP3 (and the
hotfixes) if I can't boot from L:.

The most conspicuous difference in the new installation on partition L:
compared to what's on C: is that there are only five folders (RECYCLER,
Program Files, System Volume Information, Documents and Settings and
WINDOWS) in partition L: and no files. In particular, there is no
boot.ini file.

Any suggestions for getting the computer to boot off the SATA drive?

Thanks,

R1

 

[Don Phillipson]

Any suggestions for getting the computer to boot off the SATA drive?

The query omitted how (bootable) old C: was transferred to make
(bootable) new C: Western Digital's cloning software has done
this successfully on my systems. Regular copying does not.

 

[Man-wai Chang]

My Asus M3A7-CM mobo recognizes the SATA drive, plugged into port 1, and
I've chosen the SATA setting. (The drive is capable of 6Gbps, but the
mobo only handles 3Gbps.) I'm able to install XP onto its L: partition.
But after telling the mobo to boot off the new drive, it refuses to do
so. I get this message:

"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware
configuration problem.

Did you press F6 during installation to load the SATA driver for that
motherboard?

--
@~@ Remain silent. Nothing from soldiers and magicians is real!
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty!
/( _ )\ May the Force and farces be with you!
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[Rebel1]

Did you press F6 during installation to load the SATA driver for that
motherboard?

That's something I never tried. But at this point, I can't get to the
screen that asks me to do that. When I try booting from the new drive,
everything stops after the POST. That is, a black screen with a blinking
cursor at the top left.

Thanks for the suggestion. When I had seen the F6 prompt, I didn't think
it applied to me.

R1

 

[Rebel1]

Two other considerations.

I may already have the SATA drivers on my C: drive as part of the
updates from SP2. They may be in the Windows/System32/drivers folder,
but I don't know how to identify them. There aren't any files in the
System32 folder (and subfolders) that have sata as part of their
filenames. If I could find them, I could copy them to the drivers folder
to the L: drive.

I used EASEUS Partition Manager to partition my new drive. All of its
partitions are described a logical, and none is "active" or "primary."
By contrast, my existing C: drive is marked as a System drive and
Primary, and my Seagate drive has one of its partitions marked as Primary.

So the problem is while I know how to use Partition Manager to set a
Primary drive as Active, I can't figure how to first tell it to make L:
a primary partition. Also, there is the issue that there is no boot.ini
in the L: partition.

Partition Manager shows a graphical representation of each physical
drive as a rectangle. Within each rectangle, there are smaller
rectangles, one for each partition. For my SATA drive, the L: partition
is not the leftmost. From left to right, they are P:, M:, N:, L:, O:.
May mean nothing, but the other two drives show the letters in
alphabetical order and the leftmost as being Primary.

It also may mean nothing, but there are 8 MB of unallocated space on my
new drive that Partition Manager simply refuses to remove. Neither of my
older drives has such unallocated space. Maybe it's reserved for SATA
overhead.

 

[Rebel1]

The query omitted how (bootable) old C: was transferred to make
(bootable) new C: Western Digital's cloning software has done
this successfully on my systems. Regular copying does not.

I used the original Microsoft XP SP2 CD.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

My present working configuration has two physical ATA drives. The master
is a WD 500GB drive partitioned at C:, E:, F:, H:, and I:. The slave is
a Seagate 160GB partitioned as D: and G:. (There are also two SATA
optical drives.)

I added a WD 1TB Caviar Blue SATA drive, partitioned into five. I
installed XP SP2, direct from a Microsoft CD, onto the partition (L
that will eventually become C: after I rearrange my system. (The Seagate
drive will be removed after transferring its files to the WE 500GB, with
new drive letters so there is no conflict with two C: partitions; in the
end, I'll still have two physical drives.)

My Asus M3A7-CM mobo recognizes the SATA drive, plugged into port 1, and
I've chosen the SATA setting. (The drive is capable of 6Gbps, but the
mobo only handles 3Gbps.) I'm able to install XP onto its L: partition.
But after telling the mobo to boot off the new drive, it refuses to do
so. I get this message:

"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware
configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk
hardware."

It makes no attempt to boot of the next hard drive in sequence, the
WD500GB I've been using without any problems; it just displays a black
screen with a blinking hyphen in the top left corner.

There are several possibilities that come to mind:

(1) You have to mark new boot partition as "active" through the Disk
Manager when you are in the old Windows.

(2) Your current XP is setup to work only with IDE drives, rather than
SATA drives. SATA drives can be made to look like standard IDE drives,
but you have to do that in BIOS. When you go into the BIOS setup, make
sure you select IDE rather than AHCI or RAID modes. There is no
performance difference between IDE and AHCI mode, just a few extra power
management features which are unimportant in desktops.

(3) Why are you partitioning these drives so heavily? I agree that it's
a good idea to partition out the boot partition on its own into a small
100-200GB partition, but I'd just keep the remainder of the drive as one
single separate partition. This might be confusing boot process.

(4) Why are you setting up a new XP rather than cloning the old XP?

Yousuf Khan

 

[Rebel1]

Here's what Microsoft has to say:
• You cannot mark a logical drive as active.
• You can only mark a partition as active on a master boot record (MBR)
disk.

(https://www.microsoft.com/resources...ddocs/en-us/dm_active_partition.mspx?mfr=true)

On the new drive, all the partitions are logical. So the problem becomes
making the new drive a MBR drive.

 

[Rebel1]

You neglected to mention if you installed the SATA drivers. You need to
copy the drivers from your MOBO disk and when prompted press F6 to
install the drivers.

I can't find SATA drivers on the MOBO disk.

 

[Flasherly]

Two other considerations.

I may already have the SATA drivers on my C: drive as part of the
updates from SP2. They may be in the Windows/System32/drivers folder,
but I don't know how to identify them. There aren't any files in the
System32 folder (and subfolders) that have sata as part of their
filenames. If I could find them, I could copy them to the drivers folder
to the L: drive.

I used EASEUS Partition Manager to partition my new drive. All of its
partitions are described a logical, and none is "active" or "primary."
By contrast, my existing C: drive is marked as a System drive and
Primary, and my Seagate drive has one of its partitions marked as Primary.

So the problem is while I know how to use Partition Manager to set a
Primary drive as Active, I can't figure how to first tell it to make L:
a primary partition. Also, there is the issue that there is no boot.ini
in the L: partition.

Partition Manager shows a graphical representation of each physical
drive as a rectangle. Within each rectangle, there are smaller
rectangles, one for each partition. For my SATA drive, the L: partition
is not the leftmost. From left to right, they are P:, M:, N:, L:, O:.
May mean nothing, but the other two drives show the letters in
alphabetical order and the leftmost as being Primary.

It also may mean nothing, but there are 8 MB of unallocated space on my
new drive that Partition Manager simply refuses to remove. Neither of my
older drives has such unallocated space. Maybe it's reserved for SATA
overhead.

If you're any good with the latest Hirens disc, it's excellent. But,
I'm not so sure of that if you didn't make primary partitions before
attempting a clone. I prefer earlier versions, the last, and one prior
to it, which booted via a simple DOS interface. Downside being,
between versions, getting a DVD in an older IDE port hardware
configuration for one of the *NIX Boot Arbitrator installs, I
particularly like.

Don't sweat the 8MB, that's normal and on mine as well. In a DOS
environ you've C and C prime, the second being latent, just as well
hidden, or not, according to how the flags are set by the boot
arbitrator;-- Obviously, an active OS or partition cannot overwrite
itself, hence the need to boot elsewhere to run such a program as
Western Digital. The L drive letter relative assignment for a logical
or primary, however, may work well enough for a *NIX variant, as boot
arbitration software so purport. Regardless, at the partitioning
level with Easeus it's wholly incorrect to introduce letter
assignments, which are properly and later manifest as OS specific.

Best to concentrate on getting one partition up at a time. It's been
some time, a matter of months, but with Easeus I believe I ran into
the same problem you mention, subsequent to it's partition handling
routine to system hardware active recognition for booting. I suspect
I fixed it with a DOS (USB or DVD boot device) Format.exe C: /MBR (the
infamous "hidden switch" and fix all, all so strangely useful for
corrupted MBRs).

Crap. Contacts are at me on the cell lines now. Quick side mentions
- don't sweat either the number of drives/letters, either, you've up
to the letters in the alphabet if they're not particularly unwieldy to
you. Peter Norton and earlier Ghost versions here, (between versions
I have run into nasty transfer speed issues between newer/older
hardware platforms), although WDigital and a few others appear viably
popular. This stuff, need I really say, though not rocketry isn't
what I'd care call plug-&-play for massive conventions just for
morons. Phonetime - see you (unless you see me first or I wouldn't
want to be you) at the rebound. Ta-ta and good luck.

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

 

[Rebel1]

There are several possibilities that come to mind:

(1) You have to mark new boot partition as "active" through the Disk
Manager when you are in the old Windows.

See my post that will appear about noon today.

(2) Your current XP is setup to work only with IDE drives, rather than
SATA drives. SATA drives can be made to look like standard IDE drives,
but you have to do that in BIOS. When you go into the BIOS setup, make
sure you select IDE rather than AHCI or RAID modes. There is no
performance difference between IDE and AHCI mode, just a few extra power
management features which are unimportant in desktops.

I can't find a way in the BIOS to select IDE for a SATA drive.

(3) Why are you partitioning these drives so heavily? I agree that it's
a good idea to partition out the boot partition on its own into a small
100-200GB partition, but I'd just keep the remainder of the drive as one
single separate partition. This might be confusing boot process.

Can't give a simple answer. Programs are on the C: drive, and data they
create are in other partitions on the same drive. (The hope is that if a
virus attacks, it will be confined to C: and the other stuff is not
lost. Very large music and video files, and various backups are on the
second drive. When the system is back to two drives, there will be five
partitions on the SATA drive and two on the other Western Digital drive.

(4) Why are you setting up a new XP rather than cloning the old XP?

The old XP had annoyances, like not being able to turn off the computer
if any instances of Windows Explorer are open.

Thanks for the reply.

R1

 

[Rebel1]

When partitioning the new drive, I failed to specify one as a primary.
Apparently the 8 MB of unallocated space at the front of the drive gave
me the opportunity to create a new partition and specify it as primary.

So I deleted everything (data and partitions) on the SATA drive and
started from scratch. Now I again have five partition, with one marked
as Primary. I installed XP SP2 from a CD on the primary partition. Still
can't boot to it because it's not designated as a System partition. (C:
is still the System partition.) As before, the new installation of XP
still doesn't have a boot.ini file or any other files except
pagefile.sys in the root directory. Any ideas on how to make it a System
partition and why the installation didn't generate the other files in
the root directory?

While I was installing XP, it assigned new letters to the drives. My old
L:, M:, N:, O:, and P: became respectively D:, J:, K:, L:, and M:l I
installed XP on D:. But when I boot off my original XP installation,
Windows Explorer still shows the SATA partitions as L through P. Very
confusing.

 

[Rebel1]

If you're any good with the latest Hirens disc, it's excellent. But,
I'm not so sure of that if you didn't make primary partitions before
attempting a clone. I prefer earlier versions, the last, and one prior
to it, which booted via a simple DOS interface. Downside being,
between versions, getting a DVD in an older IDE port hardware
configuration for one of the *NIX Boot Arbitrator installs, I
particularly like.

Don't sweat the 8MB, that's normal and on mine as well. In a DOS
environ you've C and C prime, the second being latent, just as well
hidden, or not, according to how the flags are set by the boot
arbitrator;-- Obviously, an active OS or partition cannot overwrite
itself, hence the need to boot elsewhere to run such a program as
Western Digital. The L drive letter relative assignment for a logical
or primary, however, may work well enough for a *NIX variant, as boot
arbitration software so purport. Regardless, at the partitioning
level with Easeus it's wholly incorrect to introduce letter
assignments, which are properly and later manifest as OS specific.

It was my choice of drive letters, knowing that in the future I would be
changing them.

Best to concentrate on getting one partition up at a time. It's been
some time, a matter of months, but with Easeus I believe I ran into
the same problem you mention, subsequent to it's partition handling
routine to system hardware active recognition for booting. I suspect
I fixed it with a DOS (USB or DVD boot device) Format.exe C: /MBR (the
infamous "hidden switch" and fix all, all so strangely useful for
corrupted MBRs).

Maybe I should again wipe out everything on the new drive and use XP to
partition it.

 

[Flasherly]

Very confusing.

Not confusing, Jacked Up. Most all exhibiting proficiency are
Handys. Handy Man: Jack of all, Master of none. Literacy is their
key component. At a certain point, anything turned upside down looks
similar enough to resemble something else, established prior as
already learned, for inherent utility then to transitionally occur.
Done over stages, and layers, for some, over years and years. The raw
components of an HD hardware assembly alone is one stage, a couple
considerations initially for the drive with software following, so
adding a few more software considerations, for the final stage and
reactance at the last layer of operational software. One step at a
time to get there, with just about enough optional steps -- depending
on hardware platform, money it costs for a capacity to engage its
design and purpose -- to ensure any clodhoppers in our presence won't
get that far ahead of themselves. Focus well enough on any individual
step, and I'd be last to admit Mastery isn't nigh within achievable
ends (takes a programmer among recognized authors, maybe a few team
collaborators writing for "inhouse code," actually, to do it, though).

 

[Man-wai Chang]

For the sake of simplicity, maybe you should just upgrade to 32-bit Win
7. Win 7 should have stock drivers for your old hardware.

--
@~@ Remain silent. Nothing from soldiers and magicians is real!
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty!
/( _ )\ May the Force and farces be with you!
^ ^ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.39.3
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[Man-wai Chang]

My present working configuration has two physical ATA drives. The master
is a WD 500GB drive partitioned at C:, E:, F:, H:, and I:. The slave is
a Seagate 160GB partitioned as D: and G:. (There are also two SATA
optical drives.)

I believe one could NOT install WinXP (and even Win 7) to a logical
drive in an extended partition. You could however do so with Linux.

Try re-arranging the drives so that you could install WinXP into a
primary partition, best, the first primary partition.

--
@~@ Remain silent. Nothing from soldiers and magicians is real!
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty!
/( _ )\ May the Force and farces be with you!
^ ^ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.39.3
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http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_pubsvc/page_socsecu/sub_addressesa

 

[Man-wai Chang]

I believe one could NOT install WinXP (and even Win 7) to a logical

drive in an extended partition. You could however do so with Linux.

Try re-arranging the drives so that you could install WinXP into a
primary partition, best, the first primary partition.

I also don't think you could NOT boot WinXP from a secondary hard disk.
I could be wrong as I had never attempted it.

--
@~@ Remain silent. Nothing from soldiers and magicians is real!
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty!
/( _ )\ May the Force and farces be with you!
^ ^ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.39.3
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[Paul]

When partitioning the new drive, I failed to specify one as a primary.
Apparently the 8 MB of unallocated space at the front of the drive gave
me the opportunity to create a new partition and specify it as primary.

So I deleted everything (data and partitions) on the SATA drive and
started from scratch. Now I again have five partition, with one marked
as Primary. I installed XP SP2 from a CD on the primary partition. Still
can't boot to it because it's not designated as a System partition. (C:
is still the System partition.) As before, the new installation of XP
still doesn't have a boot.ini file or any other files except
pagefile.sys in the root directory. Any ideas on how to make it a System
partition and why the installation didn't generate the other files in
the root directory?

While I was installing XP, it assigned new letters to the drives. My old
L:, M:, N:, O:, and P: became respectively D:, J:, K:, L:, and M:l I
installed XP on D:. But when I boot off my original XP installation,
Windows Explorer still shows the SATA partitions as L through P. Very
confusing.

Make sure only the one hard drive is connected, during the installation.

Don't allow the WinXP installer, to see the other installation at all.

You'll need at least one primary partition on your new disk.

Paul

 

[Rebel1]

Look on the disk for a folder like utilities or Drivers, I can not find
my MOBO disk or I could be more helpful. I know that the drivers are on
that disk--Do you have a Promise SATA or some other SATA setup?
You could search the disk for drivers.

Good Luck,
Rick

I have a Western Digital 1TB SATA.

 

[Rebel1]

Make sure only the one hard drive is connected, during the installation.

Don't allow the WinXP installer, to see the other installation at all.

You'll need at least one primary partition on your new disk.

Paul

That's exactly what I'm going to do. I finally got the L: partition to
be a system partition, but eventually I want it to become C:. I'm going
to scrap everything and install XP on the SATA drive with the IDE drives
removed.