Can't boot off SATA if IDE drives removed

[Mark]

After installing a new SATA drive, cloning my existing two IDE drives
onto it, setting the BIOS boot order to boot the SATA first, and
changing the C: to D: references in the registry, I'm able to boot off
the SATA just fine until I remove the IDE drives. Then the boot fails
and continues to fail until I put the IDE drives back in and boot off
of them.

Any idea why? I'd like to leave the two IDE drives powered off as I
only intend to use them for backups.

How do I remove the IDE drives and still be able to boot off the SATA?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Guest]

Check the Bios of your board, I had a similiar issue I have a dual BIOS Award
and Silicon. I went to the Silicon site and downloaded the susci drivers (for
my SATA2 drive) and it worked, maybe this will assist you in your endeavor.

 

[Mark]

Got it working! Here's how:

* Plug in the sata drive and reboot. XP should see it. Reboot into safe
mode.
* In administrative tools/disk management, make a primary partition on
the sata drive the same size as the corresponding one on the ide. Make
it active. Format it.
* Copy over your system partition with DriveImage
(http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm). Change the label so you can easily
tell which disk is which.
* Chkdsk /f the new partition. It will have some trivial errors since
it is a copy of when XP was still on it.
* Run Diskpart and enter "list disk" to find the SATA's address.
* Edit your boot.ini file and add an entry for the sata. When you
change your bios to boot the sata first, it will probably become the
same as your current ide drive. In that case, you'll need to run
diskpart after you've booted onto the sata drive and add an entry for
your ide if you want to boot off of it.
* Reboot and change your bios settings to boot your sata drive first.
* Reboot into safe mode. It should boot off the sata drive. If you look
at the label, however, you'll see c: reflects your ide drive.
* In regedit, swap the \DosDevices\C: and \DosDevices\D: (assuming c:
reflects your ide, and d: your sata) entries in
\HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices.
* Reboot in safe mode. Check that the C: and D: drive labels reflect
the correct spots (sata on c:, ide on d
* In disk management, remove the drive letter associations for your ide
partition.
* In device manager, UNINSTALL the entries for your ide disks.
* Shutdown your system and remove the power connectors from your ide
drives. You can leave the ide cables connected, or remove them and the
drives now if you're so inclined.
* Reboot and remove the bios entries for your ide drives.
* Reboot once more. It should now boot off the sata with no ide drives
attached.

Now that was easy, wasn't it?