[Mendax]

Hello everyone, I have a problem here I don't seem to be able to resolve myself and will be thankful for any help.

I just built a new computer, which has SATA disk in it. It works fine, but... I have an old IDE disk with some of the data I wanted to save from my old computer. So when I had the new one up and running, I wanted to connect old IDE drive and copy all the data to new SATA disk. However, after connecting, the computer wants to boot from IDE. Now when I go to BIOS to handle it, there's an option in which you can set the priority of HDDs for booting, but for some reason, it doesn't allow me to put the SATA disk on the first place ahead of IDE disk.

Doesn anyone have any idea how I can resolve this? Please let me know...

 

[linderman]

Welcome to TSF:

Computers ; as you have learned the hard way; love IDE they will always look for the IDE drive first and almost insist on IDE booting.

First of all it sounds as though the extra ide drive you added is acting the role of primary master ?????? please describe the current configuration of you ide drive connection / I would advise you put the jumper caps located on the hard drive / set them to slave / then connect the ide drive to the blue IDE connector on your motherboard / also put the drive in the middle of the cable / then end of the cable is reserved for primary master / see if that works

if that doesnt work / then move it to the secondary IDE connector on the motherboard / it will have a tough job booting from that location !! but if you have a dvd drive & cd-rom drive you may have to "temporarily let the ide drive "borrow" the cable and power plug so you can get the data moved over to your sata drive / remember you dont have to mount the drive in the case in order to run it / i frequesntly just place a box next to my computer / set the temp drive on it / connect the cables and power plug / back-up the drive / then restore the cable and power plug to its rightful owner.

If however you wish to keep this drive in the computer for say back-up of critical data (very good idea) then I would run a drive eraser on it / that will get rid of the boot files on the drive which is making it want to compete for the "booting" role.

let u know how you progress / dont hesitate to ask more questions

regard

joe

 

[Mendax]

Hello Joe, thanks for trying to help here.

As for the proposed solutions, the board doesn't have 2 regular IDE connectors (the other is a bit narrower), so I cannot put the IDE drive on the secondary channel. It's current as master on primary channel (with DVD as slave), but I have also tried the salve config before, same result. I am trying right now to go through the Win XP install recovery console and delete the boot files from the other disk, will let you know how that worked...

 

[Mendax]

OK, in the recovery console, there's and command called BOOTCFG, which among other allowed to show boot priorities at startup of the computer. There I had to manually select the right installation, but it worked eventually...

Thanks for trying to help again.

 

[linderman]

Well happy to hear you get thru it.



joe