SATA boot partitions not detected?

1616 Views 3 Replies 2 Participants Last post by DeltaFox, Jul 9, 2010

DeltaFox

Discussion Starter · Jul 8, 2010 (Edited)

<--My system specs are right under my screenname

I'm having some trouble getting my WD5000AAKS hard drive to boot. The bios sees the drive, but it still tells me that no boot media has been detected. I don't have a jumper on the back of the drive, but my motherboard manual says all the ports support SATA II (3.0 GB/s). I know there's a bootable partition on the drive with Windows 7 32-bit because it used to be my primary boot device before my XPS motherboard died.

I also have a SATA Raptor 160 GB hard drive with my old Vista installation on it and an old Maxtor IDE hard drive I use for data storage. After the initial blue ExpressGate screen, I see a black screen that says, "Detecting drives:" and then it lists only the IDE drive, "HDD0: Maxtor STM3200820A - 200GB" in a blue font. Why is it seeing my SATA hard drives in the BIOS, but not recognizing the boot partitions?!

EDIT: Just for some context, I have recently migrated my drives from an XPS 710 to this new ASUS motherboard.

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Tumbleweed36

· #2 · Jul 8, 2010

You may need to do a repair install of your operating system since you have migrated that drive from another motherboard. BTW, if you want to boot from the Sata, make sure you have that drive listed first in your Hard Drive Priority (boot area of the bios).

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DeltaFox

Discussion Starter · #3 · Jul 8, 2010

My main problem is that the OS doesn't have the drivers to recognize the SATA controller, right? I downloaded this driver from the ASUS download center for my mobo under the "SATA" section:

Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager Driver V8.9.0.1023 for Windows 32/64bit XP & Windows 32/64bit Vista & 32/64bit Windows 7.(WHQL) Intel(R) AHCI/RAID Driver Disk for Windows 32/64bit XP & Windows 32/64bit Vista & 32/64bit Windows 7.

I then extracted and put the drivers on a flash drive, fired up my Windows 7 Enterprise 32-bit disc, and clicked on "Repair your installation". I clicked on the "Find Drivers" button, and navigated to these two files:

IMSM_V8901023\Driver\Disk\f6flpy32\iaAHCI.inf
IMSM_V8901023\Driver\Disk\f6flpy32\iaStor.inf

The disc recognized the drivers and loaded them up, but Windows still didn't find my installation. Here's a visual of what I was seeing, but disregard the installation shown (just sample image):

That box in the picture was blank after loading the drivers. If it loaded the drivers for the SATA controller, why didn't it recognize my installation? I also tried Startup Repair just for laughs, but that didn't work. Any ideas?

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DeltaFox

Discussion Starter · #4 · Jul 9, 2010

Ok, I think I know what I need to do. To make a long story short, I need to combine the following four .INF files in order for System Recovery to be able to have the information it needs to recognize my Windows installation: ibexsmb.inf, ibexide.inf, ibexid2.inf, and ibexahci.inf. I need to combine them, because System Recovery will only let me select one at a time. Loading any one of these particular .INF files separately always results in "Installation has failed" error. Anyone have any idea how to combine .INF files?

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