No boot device problem

[adrumsolo4u]

i recently was given a computer which was pretty much in-operable. It had three SATA drives. I installed a PATA drive and everything worked fine. i installed one of the hard drives to it, removed all the bad data from it, and then installed windows on that one. however, when i try to disable the PATA drive and run entirely from the SATA drive it tells me there is no boot device available. When i enable the PATA drive it boots fine and i can boot up to my SATA drive.

Anyone have any clue what's wrong with the SATA drive?

 

[adrumsolo4u]

by the way, the SATA drive is G:\ instead of C:\ i'm not sure if that would or would not have anything to do with it.

 

[Tmagic650]

A lot of people seem to have trouble with SATA drives. Go into the bios and select the SATA drive as the first drive in the boot priority list, then make sure the SATA controller is enabled and not the IDE

 

[Samstoned]

if you installed xp on a system with more than one good partition the system drive will be last good drive
not the one your putting the OS on
so check your c drive and look for boot .ini and or go to manager look at the system drive and the boot drive
to get around this all drives that are not going to have a OS on should be removed or at least unplug the power to them then install xp via normal methods
if you want to call that normal
be carefull of combo controller booting
ide/sata
sata controller must be lead
manual will help a lot