2 SATA HD's and 1 IDE HD problemski

[bimber]

:mad: :cry: :wow:
OK , enough smilies, now to the point.
I have 2 SATA Seagate 120 GB in the A7N8X Deluxe v2
they are plugged in the onboard RAID but they are not set up as RAID. I also have 80 GB ATA 100 WD. I had no problems having them all working when Win XP Pro was booting from IDE. Without any problems I cloned the system drive to the first SATA. I should add that the IDE is a Hot Swap. When I take the IDE out, everything works perfect , In BIOS it shows that I am booting as I would expect from HDD0. Which is the first SATA drive. In Windows XP Disk Manager my SATA drives are C and D.
But when I connect the IDE (Primary Master) the booting process stops at the "Verifying DMI spooling" and will not boot. BTW The IDE drive doesn't have the system files anymore. I think that IDE drive is taking over as HDD0 somehow and the system is looking for boot record ont he wrong drive. Does any one know if making it secondary master or slave would change it.
Any serious input welcome

[Fatguy3]

I really can offer no hands on advice as I havent worked with SATA or your mobo yet.

But I'd try making it slave or putting it on the secondary channel, or looking in your BIOS. You might have it set up to boot off your IDE channel first before the SATA. Sounds like something a BIOS option should fix. If not, someone wiser than me will be along to help you out

[Evil_Inside]

Worth a try :

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showthread/t-59317.html

[bimber]

Originally Posted by Evil_Inside

Worth a try :

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showthread/t-59317.html

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Nope, I tried before to set the first boot device to SCSI but the system didn't find any SCSI, it reads my SATA's as HDD0 and HDD1
when the IDE is OUT , but when IDE is in as Primary Master I don't know who is who. My BIOS doesn't specificaly say which drive is what device.

[Fatguy3]

Then do some trial and error. Keep switching the boot devices with all the HDD's in and see what works.

[Evil_Inside]

If you reinstall xp on the sata it is going to want to install a system partition on the ide disk(ie ntldr, ntdetect, boot.ini etc) but this is likely to cause some drama if you are going to keep popping that ide disk in and out. Have you tried setting detection for the ide disk in the bios to none and seeing if xp will still detect it after boot ?

[fredvon4]

you may not want to hear this but I had similar problem...

I built new board from the A7N8X-E Delux... basically same BIOS and Sili 3112a SATA controller chipset

Used two WD Raptors in SATA and a new WD800JB as IDE Master on channel one. I wanted the boot to be SATA and but never could get XP Pro to see them as legitimate install drives so always defaulted to installing on the IDE drive. I tried taking out the IDE drive and finally found that to boot from SATA, the BIOS demanded that the first BOOT drive on SATA be defined as SCSI.

I suspect that because you did it backwards and installed XP to the IDE drive, then did the clone, that the BOOT record and Meta file ID (part of NTFS) on the IDE drive are set and will be persistant for first drive boot whenever that drive is persent.

I recommend a reinstal of XP onto the SATA HDD0 clean and later install the IDE drive with an compleatly new partition and format.

Note: The other problem I had was on XP install I was required to hit F6 to add "other Mass storage devices" after a wait of a while the XP loaded a temporay system and demanded I define the new mass storage device and insert driver disk in drive A: ...

This gave me some grief as the Asus SATA driver were on CD. Took a while before I found just the right mix of files that would fit on 1.44mb as the Asus driver instal on CD is an EXE program that is too big. But once I got the ini and driver file into the XP loader all went fine and XP installed just fine onto my SATA HDD0 C: partition.

When I decided to experiment with the Raid 0 capabilitys I had to do a clean reinstall as I reversed what you did and cloned the boot partition to the IDE drive and after setting up the Raid tried to clone back to the SATA. XP would only boot from the IDE drive. I took out the drive, reformated the SATA mirrored set, installed XP (27 total minutes) and then put back the IDE master on channel one, reformated it and all is now right with the world. But it was one royal PITA!


HTH
Fred

[bimber]

Thanx , guys. Especially fred. I wonder if messing with boot.ini would do any good?