Sata & IDE Boot

T

tomb08uk

New Member
Hi, I am having a slight difficulty with 2 Harddrives I have in my system.

The Harddrives are a Maxtor 160gb SATA
and a Samsung 160gb IDE.

I have currently Windows XP Media Center installed on the IDE which is partitoned so is dual boot for Windows and Linux. And everything works fine.

But I want to use the SATA Harddrive for my personal data; music, photos, documents etc.
Now on the SATA Harddrive at the current time their is a corrupt version of windows which wont boot (If try and boot loads the windows xp logo then blue screen appears and machine restarts) so i want to be able to format this HDD then use it as slave to run aong side windows. But the problem is if i connect both HDD's then the system automatically tries and loads the corrupt OS, which is on the SATA HDD, which i cant seem to prevent. BIOS settings are listed to boot IDE first but it doesnt seem to do it.

And also if the SATA HDD is connected then it doesnt even allow me to boot from CD so its not like i can do a repair or fresh install.

Sorry for the lengt of this post just want to explain a good as possible.

Motherboard is a gigabyte.

Any suggestions and advice would be great!

Tom
 
If you have a Windows XP CD, boot off of that and delete the partition(s) on the SATA drive, then restart.
 
[-0MEGA-] said:
If you have a Windows XP CD, boot off of that and delete the partition(s) on the SATA drive, then restart.
Click to expand...

Thanks for fast response, but that isnt possible.

"And also if the SATA HDD is connected then it doesnt even allow me to boot from CD so its not like i can do a repair or fresh install."

To recap if the SATA is connected, then it automatically goes to load the OS, doesnt allow me to boot CD.

Thanks

Tom
 
Thats why you go into your BIOS and change the boot order, so the CD Drives boot first, then the hard drives.
 
[-0MEGA-] said:
Thats why you go into your BIOS and change the boot order, so the CD Drives boot first, then the hard drives.
Click to expand...
I have done that but it is something to do with the fact its SATA and doesnt operate the same as IDE does.

The boot order is as follows:

CD-ROM
HDD
FLOPPY

So boot order isnt anything to do with it.
 
Then set CD-ROM as the first, and disable the other two. If that doesnt work, then theres something wrong with your motherboard, because the CD-ROm should boot first.
 
[-0MEGA-] said:
Then set CD-ROM as the first, and disable the other two. If that doesnt work, then theres something wrong with your motherboard, because the CD-ROm should boot first.
Click to expand...

It's nothing to do with the motherboard. I know its something to do with SATA doesnt like being a slave as such..

Thanks, but i will wait til someone else comes on with ideas.

Thanks
 
Do you by any chance have a floppy drive in your computer? Because i know you can make floppy boot disks that can format hard drives, since your CD-ROM drive doesnt boot first.
 
[-0MEGA-] said:
Do you by any chance have a floppy drive in your computer? Because i know you can make floppy boot disks that can format hard drives, since your CD-ROM drive doesnt boot first.
Click to expand...
Yes i have a floppy drive installed..
 
[-0MEGA-] said:
This may help you out: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q255867/

Im not positive if it will work on SATA drives. I would just use this to delete the data thats on there now, and once you get XP loaded up, i would format it again using the NTFS format.
Click to expand...

Im not sure.

I just went into the BIOS and disabled booting the HDD and Floppy, so that the only boot option was CD-ROM but once i restarted it, it just booted the HDD even though the XP CD was in the drive and I was pressing the keys to boot the CD-ROM. So something is not right...

Any one else any suggestions?

Tom
 
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