Hard drive q?

[Duncx]

I currently have a 120gb IDE and a 250gb SATA drive as C and D respectively.
I have XP installed on the D sata drive.

I have just bought a 500gb SATA to replace the 120gb IDE.

If I install the new SATA drive and remove the IDE drive I get the message NTLDR not found. I tried using my XP CD to repair it and it says that the partition on the original SATA drive is not a valid XP partition so I can't repair it.

If I put all 3 drives in when I boot I get a message about invalid drive configuration and it won't boot. If I try the XP CD and select the original SATA (D: ) drive I don't get the (2nd) repair option and if I choose to install on that drive it tells me there is already an XP installation on A:\WINDOWS and it will replace it, WTF.

I'm totally confused! Am I gonna have to reinstall XP to get this new drive to work??

 

[DrR]

Because the boot sequence will be found on drive c (which you now removed) so the pc will not know to boot from drive D i think.

 

[FiDoDiDo]

So long as the only drive that is set as active (to boot from) is the XP drive it should be allocated the drive letter C and rules follow on from there. You'll need to make sure that the drive you want to boot from is set as active.

 

[Duncx]

b****cks!

C: is my system volume and D: is my boot volume!!!

Oh well, a reinstall ain't a bad thing.

 

[FiDoDiDo]

If you change the config using something like Partion Magic to set the active partition as D you shouldn't have a problem.

 

[Jaff]

i dunno much about sata ide yes sata no, any way as i understan there is no master or slave with sata, unlike ide. so if your boot drive is the D: you could i thnk be able to swap the volume assignment letters through disk manager. i done that with my CD drives, just because i wanted my other storage to be X,Y,& Z

out of curiocitys it an ide mother board or a sata one, or combi?

 

[GordonD]

I'm totally confused! Am I gonna have to reinstall XP to get this new drive to work??

The short answer is "yes".

The long answer is that if you are booting off a SATA drive you may also need to install the SATA driver when you install Windows to boot off a SATA drive. You'll need to make up a SATA driver floppy for your motherboard, and when you are prompted at the start of the XP installation whether you have any SCSI drivers to install press F6.

SATA drives were unfortunately implemented in a way that confuses everyone, including Microsoft.

 

[Duncx]

i dunno much about sata ide yes sata no, any way as i understan there is no master or slave with sata, unlike ide. so if your boot drive is the D: you could i thnk be able to swap the volume assignment letters through disk manager. i done that with my CD drives, just because i wanted my other storage to be X,Y,& Z

out of curiocitys it an ide mother board or a sata one, or combi?

I can't change the drive letters as one is system and the other is boot so XP won't let me.

It is a combi motherboard with both IDE and SATA onboard.