Weird Harddrive Boot Problem

PohTayToez

PohTayToez

Active Member
Ok, so in my system there has been a 250GB IDE HDD for a while. It started out as my main drive, and I later upgraded to a 250GB SATA. I've had several different windows partitions on up to three different drives at a time, but I've just recently found out that I can't boot any of them unless I set my BIOS to boot from the 250GB first. From there, it gives me a choice between the different windows installations, but without the IDE drive, it will give me a "SYSTEM BOOT DISK FAILURE, PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" or something like that.

I had hoped to remove the 250GB IDE and sell it, in order to go to a completely SATA setup, and reduce the number of hard drives I have. If it helps, I'm using an ASUS A8N-E motherboard, which is what I would imagine would be the source of the problem. Anyone have any ideas?
 
Your board isn't the problem there. Asus are one of the top makes for boards out. Your problem stems from the primary ide drive's master boot record containing the boot information for each Windows installation as well as the boot.ini file found hidden by default at the root of that drive. Depending on the versions of Windows on the one or more sata drive like with XP you can use the recovery console to rewrite the mbr for each Windows installation other then the one on the ide "host" drive.

The Windows installer generally looks for the first drive if an ide drive is present or a pre-existing Windows installation for adding to the boot information or upgrade. With Vista the process of repair for the boot information is improved with an automatic tool for startup problems on the installation disk. With XP the "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" commands would be used after the host ide drive is removed. The other option is to perform a repair install of Windows on each other installation once the host is gone.
 
Ok, I think I get at what you're saying, can you direct me somewhere that would explain how to use the XP recovery console. All I've ever done is CHKDISK and similar basic things like that.

Also, I've tried a couple other SATAs that never had an XP partition on then, and they respond normally, with only a "NO OS FOUND", but I don't want to lose the data on them by formating them for XP. I formatted one of my drives that did have an XP partition that would only boot with the IDE drive, and then removed all the other drives except for that one, but with still the same "BOOT DISK FAILURE" error.
 
Ive had the same problem. THe exact same problem. Exactly identical. PC eye says its the MBR at fault. It isnt.

The problem i had was that the IDE cable was defect. Simple as that. I swapped out the cable and it worked. Just like that.
 
With or without the other drives it would sound like the XP master boot record was on the odd sata and not on the ide host or the boot order is set wrong in the bios setup itself trying to load Windows off of the sata drive instead of the ide drive there. That would explain the error message seen. Do you have the manual for the board? If not you will need to go to the manufacturer's support site and have Adobe Reader installed to open and review the manual there. That will show where to look in the bios for assigning the fiirst drive in the order. http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us

When you open to the correct 2.6.5 section you will see the image here as what to look for while in the bios setup. It will be about 3/4 down through the online version there.

 
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