Asus A7N8XE-Deluxe - Can't upgrade from IDE to SATA

[newsbirdie2]

I cannot get my new SATA drive to boot. Here's what I've done:

I flashed the motherboard BIOS.
I used ghost to copy the old IDE drive to my new SATA drive, including
MBR.
I used the XP disk manager to set the partition as active.
I turned off the PC and removed the IDE drive (I'm not risking losing
it).
I downloaded the latest SATA drivers from the ASUS site and put them on
floppy.
I booted from the XP CD-ROM and hit F6 and then S to select the Silicon
Image (3112) drivers on the floppy.

Windows XP setup detects the drive and sees the windows partition and
will let me attempt the repair installation. However, when it reboots
and goes to the windows XP logo screen, it just hangs there. I've let
it go for an hour and it just stays there. Every 5-10 minutes the hard
drive LED light comes on and the bar moves a bit and then freezes. In
the past I've done a repair install and this phase lasts just a few
minutes at the most.

I've tried with the latest silicon image drivers from the silicon image
website, that doesn't work (both RAID & IDE drivers). I don't know
what else to try. I cannot reinstall windows, I have too many
applications installed. If I can't get this to work then the only
choice I see is to keep my IDE drive as the boot drive and use the SATA
drive as a second drive. I'm really wishing I had purchased IDE
instead of SATA.

if anyone has any ideas please let me know!

Thanks,
Michael

 

[Looney]

Install a new copy of windows on the new sata drive, just like a new
pc, and get it al working, then ghost it over.

 

[newsbirdie2]

Install a new copy of windows on the new sata drive, just like a new

pc, and get it al working, then ghost it over.

Good idea. If that doesn't work then I rule out Ghost and I know there
is a problem.

 

[judder]

I cannot get my new SATA drive to boot. Here's what I've done:

I flashed the motherboard BIOS.
I used ghost to copy the old IDE drive to my new SATA drive, including
MBR.
I used the XP disk manager to set the partition as active.
I turned off the PC and removed the IDE drive (I'm not risking losing
it).
I downloaded the latest SATA drivers from the ASUS site and put them on
floppy.
I booted from the XP CD-ROM and hit F6 and then S to select the Silicon
Image (3112) drivers on the floppy.

Windows XP setup detects the drive and sees the windows partition and
will let me attempt the repair installation. However, when it reboots
and goes to the windows XP logo screen, it just hangs there. I've let
it go for an hour and it just stays there. Every 5-10 minutes the hard
drive LED light comes on and the bar moves a bit and then freezes. In
the past I've done a repair install and this phase lasts just a few
minutes at the most.

I've tried with the latest silicon image drivers from the silicon image
website, that doesn't work (both RAID & IDE drivers). I don't know
what else to try. I cannot reinstall windows, I have too many
applications installed. If I can't get this to work then the only
choice I see is to keep my IDE drive as the boot drive and use the SATA
drive as a second drive. I'm really wishing I had purchased IDE
instead of SATA.

if anyone has any ideas please let me know!

Have you set the boot sequence in the bios to boot to scsi instead of ide ?
you dont mention this in your message.

 

[newsbirdie2]

Yes I did, besides I removed the IDE drives so there is only the SATA
drive in the system!

 

[Kent Sarnes]

Do you have several partitions on your IDE disc?

 

[NickM]

Ghost can sometimes cause problems with booting from a cloned drive with
copying the active partition information, and you should find tools to help
you overcome these on your original Ghost CD depending on the version you
are using. Otherwise AFAIK, you can download the same utilities from the
Symantec site for free.

However, that said, your problem doesn't actually sound like those that I
have experienced with cloned drives using Ghost in that they usually either
boot or they don't. To me it sounds as if here is another issue and I think
it could be with the SATA device driver. This should be present and active
on your original disk image before you Ghost it over, and although running
the repair routine in XP *should* sort it out, I would still be inclined to
install the SATA driver on your original installation. Of course it might
be something else.

Have you tried booting in Safe Mode? If that works, then you almost
certainly have a driver conflict. You could try a normal boot but log the
boot process. Reading the log of the failed boot in safe mode might give
you some clues. When the loading of fonts consistently fails, it's nearly
always a graphics driver problem. I know we're talking about a SATA drive,
but booting in safe mode and removing the IDE controller in Device Manager
might sort the problem as well (Windows will automatically reload the
necessary drivers for the IDE controller next time it boots). You may even
find that the SATA drive boots successfully after a couple of hours (Why so
long? See story below. Patience can be a virtue LOL).

A little story which is relevant but slightly OT: I had cause to rebuild an
old installation of Windows Server 2003 SBS on a donor machine to retrieve
some MS Exchange Data for a client recently. The temporary donor server
took ages to boot (I mean about 4 hours) and was only a couple of weeks
later after the successful retrieval when it was necessary to re-boot the
actual server to find it too was taking way too long (similar to the
scenario you describe). It transpired that the server with the new
installation of SBS was running an APC US with version 6 of the UPS
controller software which relies on a Java plug-in. The Java plugin
apparently was automatically updated on July 27, but was now incompatible
with the APC software. It took a little while to discover, but after
removing the APC software, the server booted as normal. It was about August
3rd when I rebuilt the original SBS image on the donor PC BTW and had
assumed that the extremely long boot time was caused by a driver conflict as
the donor PC was a completely different spec to the actual server - didn't
matter particularly as all I needed to do was recover some emails. The Java
cause wasn't particularly well documented either at that time. I don't
think the cause of your problem is the same as this BTW, but I use this
example to illustrate how something so obscure can cause all sorts of
headaches.

Regards

Nick

 

[newsbirdie2]

I made some progress. I installed windows like a fresh install and
could reboot just fine. so then I went back to ghost.. the problem
appears to be with ghost, running in windows. I tried with the new
drive as D and then when I went to do my repair install it saw windows
in D:\windows so that was a mistake. I then redid the ghost, this time
without giving the SATA drive a drive letter and then the repair
install couldn't find the windows install. I expected ghost to make
the SATA drive C:\windows. I guess it can't do that when running
inside windows.

I'm going to try the ghost boot cd without going into windows, and if
that doesn't work, I will try acronis true image. I think ghost is a
piece of crap at this point!!!

 

[milleron]

I made some progress. I installed windows like a fresh install and
could reboot just fine. so then I went back to ghost.. the problem
appears to be with ghost, running in windows. I tried with the new
drive as D and then when I went to do my repair install it saw windows
in D:\windows so that was a mistake. I then redid the ghost, this time
without giving the SATA drive a drive letter and then the repair
install couldn't find the windows install. I expected ghost to make
the SATA drive C:\windows. I guess it can't do that when running
inside windows.

I'm going to try the ghost boot cd without going into windows, and if
that doesn't work, I will try acronis true image. I think ghost is a
piece of crap at this point!!!

Well, I share that opinion. I have not been able to get Ghost 9 to
work at all on my new installation of XP. It errors out with codes
that indicate that there's a conflict with the Data Execution
Prevention (DEP) feature that was added to XP with SP2. However, even
if I disable DEP in BOOT.INI, XP still BSODs during launch with the
message that the Ghost driver caused a flaw. Fortunately, my XP
partition is FAT32, so it's simple to rename that driver to prevent it
from loading, after which XP launches normally . . . but Ghost, of
course, won't work.

This is strange because Ghost DOES work for me on an older
installation of XP that's been updated to SP2. The Symantec support
folks kicked this ticket all the way up to their "engineers," but
after a few emails, they stopped communicating with me. I presume
that was Symantec's way of telling me to f*&! off. They did not offer
to refund my purchase price. I wanted Ghost only because it allows
you to specify the number of full backups you want to keep, before
starting a new backup set, the only thing I can't do just as well or
better with Acronis True Image 8. (TI9 has been released, but it's
not clear whether this feature has been added or not.)

If you've read this far, my advice is to try the process with True
Image . . . after adding the Silicon Image SATA controller driver to
your original XP installation on the original P-ATA drive.



Ron

 

[newsbirdie2]

If you've read this far, my advice is to try the process with True

Image . . . after adding the Silicon Image SATA controller driver to
your original XP installation on the original P-ATA drive.

True Image worked fine first time. Ghost is the worst piece of crap
I've ever seen. True Image is awesome.

 

[milleron]

True Image worked fine first time. Ghost is the worst piece of crap
I've ever seen. True Image is awesome.

Ghost isn't exactly the worst piece of crap I've ever seen, but I
figured that as soon as Symantec purchased it from PowerQuest (it's a
rebadged version of PowerQuest V2i Protector, Desktop Edition), they
would immediately set to work on transforming it into the worst piece
of crap I've ever seen. So far, they're on schedule. I reckon it's
just a matter of time until they screw up Partition Magic to the point
that it's unusable, too.

I've had Symantec products on my computers since 1990, but when my NAV
subscriptions run out, I'll be finished with them.


Ron

 

[No-one]

If you've read this far, my advice is to try the process with True
Image . . . after adding the Silicon Image SATA controller driver to
your original XP installation on the original P-ATA drive.

I did just this today for a friend. Installed the SATA drivers to the
IDE disk, then booted the True Image boot CD and cloned the drive to a
new SATA disk. Took out the IDE drive and it booted sweetly first
time from the SATA (after setting to boot from SCSI).

 

[newsbirdie2]

of crap I've ever seen. So far, they're on schedule. I reckon it's

just a matter of time until they screw up Partition Magic to the point
that it's unusable, too.

I tried using PM to copy the IDE partition but that didn't work.
Frankly PM never worked that great when it was a PQ product.
Especially resizing partitions.

I've had Symantec products on my computers since 1990, but when my NAV
subscriptions run out, I'll be finished with them.

I'm debating the same thing. But what to use? MacAfee? I have it at
work and it consumes 100% CPU every time I even think about looking at
a ZIP file. I mean, I rename a zip file and it scans it, rendering my
PC useless for 30 seconds or more. And I have a P4 with 2gigs ram..

 

[newsbirdie2]

The copy worked, the installed applications didn't. For example,
photoshop would have had to be reinstalled due to activation. I hate
that activation stuff. Anyway, I figured it'd be easier to just
reformat, repartition, and re-install. I upgraded a lot of stuff at
the same time..