Hard drive installation problems

[Turner]

I recentely aquired a new computer. It has SATA connectors for the hard drive, but IDE for the optical drive. Cool, I was thinking, I can put my old hard drive in and copy files that way, so I don't have to burn them to disc.

Well, as it turns out when I put my old IDE HD into the computer, even though I have the jumpers set to 'slave' it tries to boot from the slave hard drive. Evidently my SATA hard drive doesn't have a master jumper. It's a Maxtor 200gig HD, but I don't know what model. It has four jumpers without a little dongle back there to connect the drivers.

So the computer tries to boot off the Slave and blue screens, giving me a 0x7a error, which is either a bad driver or boot sector virus error. I'm thinking that it's the slave hard drive not recognizing the new computer. Which, I don't really want it too.

I can't seem to get to the bios either. So right now I'm resigned to bringing in the hard drive to my work computer which is strictly IDE and burning the stuff off there.

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions on how to get my SATA drive to be master?

 

[grahamiam]

Have you gone into your BIOS and set your Boot Device Priority? There should be a selection for your on-board SATA controller vs the IDE controller.

Something should be located under "Advanced BIOS Features" or something like that, then lower should be a Hard Disk Boot Priority or Boot Device Priority, but without knowing what BIOS/motherboard you are using, it's hard to know for sure.

 

[Speedo]

So the computer tries to boot off the Slave and blue screens, giving me a 0x7a error, which is either a bad driver or boot sector virus error. I'm thinking that it's the slave hard drive not recognizing the new computer. Which, I don't really want it too.

The windows install on the Maxtor will be setup with different chipset drivers (unless the computer it came from just happened to be identical to the new one). No chipset = no boot.

You'll just have to find out how to get into the BIOS - it's usually Delete, F1 or F10 that gets you into it. If it happens to be password locked find the jumper or button on the motherboard for either reset CMOS or clear password . Most of the time the CMOS reset switch/jumper will clear the password (but at the same time reset all of the BIOS settings) but in some comps there's a seperate jumper for the password.

 

[dragokatzov]

there is no way aroudn this, IDE will always boot first before SATA

 

[Speedo]

there is no way aroudn this, IDE will always boot first before SATA

Depends. Most modern BIOSs will let you set the boot order by type (HDD, optical, floppy, network, USB, etc) and then within each type set the order for the specific devices if you have multiple drives.

When I first got the Vista beta I was running it on an ancient 13GB IDE drive, and booting to it by swapping boot order in the BIOS.

 

[Turner]

there is no way aroudn this, IDE will always boot first before SATA

That turns out not to be the case with my machine. I can set it in the bios, I just wasn't fast enough in hitting the F1 key. Once I started hitting that key as soon as it was powered on, I was able to get into the BIOS. For some reason, the screen was different with the second hard drive put in.

Anyways, I got it mounted and can boot off my SATA now.

Thanks for the help.