Can't boot XP off new SATA drive

[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.

If you want the drive letter to be C:, start with the one primary partition
on the single drive, giving the installer no choice

A Windows installer has to be carefully backed into a corner, with
a chair in one hand, and a whip in the other. Sooner or later,
you get what you want.

Paul

 

[Rebel1]

After making very slow progress, I finally decided to install XP with
just the new SATA connected. I first removed all the partitions using
Partition Manager. Windows dutifully assigned the partition as C:.
Everything went okay; no problems booting.

I never had to locate separate SATA drivers and I never had to press F6
during installation. I'm puzzled as to why some of you suggested
pressing it, since I don't have RAID or ACHI.

I reconnected the two ATA drives, and Windows merely assigned them new
letters. Now I have the ordeal of reinstalling my programs, drivers, etc.

Many thanks to all who graciously commented. This was a real education.

R1

 

[Paul]

After making very slow progress, I finally decided to install XP with
just the new SATA connected. I first removed all the partitions using
Partition Manager. Windows dutifully assigned the partition as C:.
Everything went okay; no problems booting.

I never had to locate separate SATA drivers and I never had to press F6
during installation. I'm puzzled as to why some of you suggested
pressing it, since I don't have RAID or ACHI.

I reconnected the two ATA drives, and Windows merely assigned them new
letters. Now I have the ordeal of reinstalling my programs, drivers, etc.

Many thanks to all who graciously commented. This was a real education.

R1

Well, at least now you've had an opportunity to see "System" and "Boot"
split on your computer, and the consequences. I didn't know about
some of the side effects of this, until I tried installing Win2K
a second time on a test system here (two copies of Win2K dual booting),
and I got the same kind of lesson you just got. Before that happened,
I hadn't realized just how creative the Windows installer is. In many ways,
it's as obnoxious as Linux GRUB.

Linux GRUB is so obnoxious, it'll even overwrite the MBR of the "wrong" drive.
That's when you learn what "FixMBR" is for

Paul

 

[Man-wai Chang]

After making very slow progress, I finally decided to install XP with

just the new SATA connected. I first removed all the partitions using
Partition Manager. Windows dutifully assigned the partition as C:.
Everything went okay; no problems booting.

If you had time: check out whether you could install XP to a logical
drive inside an EXTENDED partition. I still believe you could NOT do
that.


--
@~@ 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

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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.

The SATA drivers aren't named "SATA", they are usually named "AHCI". The
Microsoft-supplied SATA drivers are called "msahci.sys", while the IDE
drivers are called "pciide.sys".

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.

Here's your problem. There is no Windows of any kind that can boot off
of a logical partition, they must boot off of primary partitions. Linux
in this context is far superior, as it doesn't make any distinction
between logical or primary partitions, it can boot off of either.

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.

You'll have to redo the partitions, and forget about Easus, use the
Windows Disk Manager. Wipe out all of the existing partitions, and
create at least one primary partition, which will be your boot
partition, and the remaining partitions can be logical ones.

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.

Yeah, don't worry about that. That is standard for most drives.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Rebel1]

If you had time: check out whether you could install XP to a logical
drive inside an EXTENDED partition. I still believe you could NOT do
that.

You are probably right, but I've put enough of my time into this, so I'm
not interested in experimenting anymore.

R1

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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

Okay then, then that means it doesn't offer that additional mode, so
it's not likely the problem. Just for your record, even though this
doesn't likely affect you, when you run a SATA drive with IDE drivers,
then you are running it according to the ATA version 7 specs, but when
you run these drives with AHCI drivers, then you are running it
according to the ATA version 8 specs. Only SATA drives can be run with
either ATA7 or ATA8 specs, older EIDE drives can only be run on the ATA7
specs.

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.

These days most viruses don't attack your data: they may steal your data
and give it to someone else (eg. bank accounts, passwords, etc.), but
leave it intact mostly. The days of the malicious data wiping virus are
long over, these days there is big business in data theft, rather than
simple pranks to erase your data. Besides, many of those data wiping
viruses were also able to erase partition tables too, so having separate
partitions was not going to be a safeguard.

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

I think you may find that problem still occurs even after you've gotten
a fresh install of XP onboard. Have you considered going to Windows 7 yet?

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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

You mentioned in another posting that you can't find a way to change the
settings for IDE vs. AHCI mode in the BIOS, so that means it's likely
defaulting to IDE. So you really don't have to worry about this anymore.
However, if you need the latest drivers for your motherboard, you can
always go to your mobo mfg's website and download the latest.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Man-wai Chang]

I never had to locate separate SATA drivers and I never had to press F6

during installation. I'm puzzled as to why some of you suggested
pressing it, since I don't have RAID or ACHI.

I should have not cursory read your message.

--
@~@ 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
ä¸å€Ÿè²¸! ä¸è©é¨™! ä¸æ´äº¤! ä¸æ‰“交! ä¸æ‰“劫! ä¸è‡ªæ®º! è«‹è€ƒæ…®ç¶œæ´ (CSSA):
http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_pubsvc/page_socsecu/sub_addressesa

 

[Flasherly]

After making very slow progress, I finally decided to install XP with
just the new SATA connected. I first removed all the partitions using
Partition Manager. Windows dutifully assigned the partition as C:.
Everything went okay; no problems booting.

I never had to locate separate SATA drivers and I never had to press F6
during installation. I'm puzzled as to why some of you suggested
pressing it, since I don't have RAID or ACHI.

I reconnected the two ATA drives, and Windows merely assigned them new
letters. Now I have the ordeal of reinstalling my programs, drivers, etc.

Many thanks to all who graciously commented. This was a real education.

R1

Windoze handling a correction of Easeus's (sp?) screw up, just
confirms what I already suspected, mentioned, and how I also handled
that ... just a little differently, though.

I'd made already two active PRIMARY drives on the same thing, a 1T at
least or bigger 1.5T drive. Little dinky things, 3G/FAT32 for a
Windoze OS (sans all installs, which get linked back from another
LOGICAL drive for another, more or less, story), and about a 528M DOS
- 98 or facsimile IBMDOS, 4DOS, TRISHDOS, what have you in FAT16/20,
or may even be 32. Rudimentary, crudely but purposefully so, DOS for
binary for thingies like WD image type software.

Good ol' Easeus. Didn't just didn't want to say, grab your ankles and
count on it. Only, I didn't screw around, booted a HIREMs disc cause
I knew good and damn well what was going on as soon as I saw that
crap. (I did, however, trust Easeus's layout, how it's sector/
custering the HD structure and left it alone. No problems, in other
words, so far. . .).

Soon as I ran a FDISK variant off HIRENS with /MBR (ooo..Master, Boot
Repair..ooo please) -- solvency. Up and on the ol' merrily, merrily
and off we go to hiho again.

 

[Flasherly]

PS - And a Belated Greeting, as well:

Welcome, conceptually, to KLUDGE (where on earth would computers be
without all these bugs and traps -- pure Chaos Theory, indubitably).

 

[Paul]

Here's your problem. There is no Windows of any kind that can boot off
of a logical partition, they must boot off of primary partitions. Linux
in this context is far superior, as it doesn't make any distinction
between logical or primary partitions, it can boot off of either.

Yousuf Khan

There's a subtle distinction here. Windows uses a primary partition,
and the boot flag. That's what the boot loader in the MBR is using
in terms of facilities.

But the entire Windows OS doesn't have to be in a primary. The majority
of the OS files can be located in a logical. It's just the part that supports
the initial boot process, that sits in a primary.

When I dual booted two copies of Win2K, the second copy sat in a
logical. The first install, sitting in a primary, boots and puts
up the boot menu. When you select the second instance of Win2K,
that runs from its logical partition. So the instance in the
logical partition, can't start by itself. But it can be made
to run, if another Windows "bootstraps it".

Paul

 

[Don Phillipson]

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.

For Western Digital users, the WD DLG cloning routine does this
quicklessly and flawlessly.

 

[Robin Bignall]

For Western Digital users, the WD DLG cloning routine does this
quicklessly and flawlessly.

At a sedate time of my life I like quicklessly, Don. No need to rush
things.