Help needed changing from IDE to SATA drives

[Ward]

Hello everyone. Good day.

I have a MSI K8T Neo F12R MOBO with 1GB Ram and AMD 64 3000+ processor
running Windows 2000 Pro. I have two 80 GB IDE Western Digital Hard
Drives installed, drive letter C and E. I've just purchased a Western
Digital SATA 200 GB drive. I've installed the drive to SATA 1 using the
Promise what have yous. The SATA drive letter is G and has been
formatted using the Disk Management utility in Win2k. I used Ghost to
clone my C drive (my boot drive) to my nice new SATA drive. All went
smooth as butta.

Now I'd like to make my system boot from my SATA drive and use the
other two IDE drives for music, movies, backups, etc.

Question before I haul off and really screw things up by changing drive
letters as (new SATA drive currently G to C and old IDE drive currently
C to G) described in the Microsoft article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188/EN-US/ (which I've done before
by the way - just not involving a SATA drive) is do I need to change
the boot.ini file, change BIOS or anything else I'm overlooking? The
drive letter change thingy has worked well for me in the past, but I've
never done it involving a SATA drive before. I figured I'd ask for
assistance now while my computer is working rather than later when it
isn't.

UPDATE: So far I've tried F11 to choose the SATA drive and got an error
at startup. The Promise BIOS check at startup shows the 200 GB SATA
drive, but futher along gives me an error message about a boot failure.
Then the boot sequence continues from the IDE drive and boots up ok.
All disk drives, including the SATA drive function within Windows.

I've also tried to unplug the two IDE drives and just leave the SATA
drive to boot. I get the same message about boot failure.

A bit of history - I installed the SATA drivers per the instructions in
my Serial ATA RAID and Serial ATA Quick User's Guide which told me to
load the drivers from the supplied CD since I'm not doing a fresh
windows install.

Another thing, I've got the SATA drive plugged into the SER1 plug on
the motherboard per the instructions in the manual since I'm using the
promise drivers. Is that correct? I'm thinking it is since the drive is
working all except for being able to boot from it.

I'm thinking that the SATA drivers are not correctly installed on the
SATA drive and thus not allowing me to boot from the disk. I will
remind the forum that I made a Norton Ghost clone from my existing boot
IDE drive and placed it on my new SATA drive. I think I'm gonna try the
CD SATA driver installer again.
UPDATE: That didn't work. Still not booting from SATA.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I have a MSI K8T Neo F12R MOBO with 1GB Ram and AMD
64 3000+ processor running Windows 2000 Pro. I have two
80 GB IDE Western Digital Hard Drives installed, drive letter
C and E. I've just purchased a Western Digital SATA 200 GB
drive. I've installed the drive to SATA 1 using the Promise
what have yous. The SATA drive letter is G and has been
formatted using the Disk Management utility in Win2k. I used
Ghost to clone my C drive (my boot drive) to my nice new
SATA drive. All went smooth as butta.

Now I'd like to make my system boot from my SATA drive
and use the other two IDE drives for music, movies,
backups, etc.

Question before I haul off and really screw things up by
changing drive letters as (new SATA drive currently G to C
and old IDE drive currently C to G) described in the
Microsoft article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188/EN-US/
(which I've done before by the way - just not involving a SATA
drive) is do I need to change the boot.ini file, change BIOS
or anything else I'm overlooking? The drive letter change
thingy has worked well for me in the past, but I've never done
it involving a SATA drive before. I figured I'd ask for assistance
now while my computer is working rather than later when it isn't.

AFAIK, both S-ATA and P-ATA drives are IDE drives, and
their boot procedures are the same and the only difference
from the user's point of view would be the way the default
boot sequence is set. With a P-ATA drive, there can be 2
HDs on a channel, and the Master leads the Slave by default
in the boot sequence (which, of course, may be reversed by
manual input to the BIOS menu). In the case of S-ATA, the
boot sequence probably has a default that follows the channel
no. of the S-ATA channel no. (I'm not sure of that.) So, the first
thing you should do is to see if the new S-ATA drive is at the
head of the boot sequence. If not make it so by resetting the
BIOS's HD boot sequence. (I assume, since you've done this
before with P-ATA drives, that you marked the new partition
containing the boot.ini (and ntldr) files "active", and that you
copied the MBR from the cloned drive to the new S-ATA drive,
and that you disconnected the cloned drive before trying to
boot the new OS for the 1st time. Have you done all this?)

*TimDaniels*