Error Loading Operating System - XP

Howdy all. I was hoping someone -- ANYONE -- could help me with what has become the bane of my existence!

Long story short, my first SATA drive, a Maxtor 6B250S0 died a few months after I got it, and was covered under warranty. Upon receiving the new drive, I wanted to GHOST (v10) the old EIDE ATA Drive onto the new SATA drive. The operation succeeded except I could not make the new SATA drive the system drive. I eventually gave up and decided to rebuild the system. I mention this only because I was able to successfully move all the contents of the old drive onto the new one (and I could access and manipulate the files, I just couldn't boot from the disk) -- the consistent problem was that after navigating the BIOS on boot up, I would receive "Error loading Operating System" when the OS should have taken over.

Now to my existing problem. Actually, the same problem. I have killed the existing partition and low-level reformatted the drive. After copying all of the XP files onto the hard drive, I'm getting the same error -- "Error loading operating system". Here is what I have tried in no particular order:

1. Fixboot
2. FixMBR
3. Tried using Maxtors MAXBLAST to establish the a full 250 GB partition (running original XP disks; not SP1 or SP2)
4. Tried utilizing standard 137 GB partition via XP
5. Removed all EIDE cables except those utilized for CD-ROM/DVD access
6. Diag'ed the disk using Maxtor's Powermax (it's fine according to the diag)

I'm tapped. No matter what I've tried, it does not appear to want to be anything other than a slave drive, EVEN THOUGH THE BIOS LISTS IT AS A MASTER DISK (and it is installed on SATA 1 on the MB; ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe). It currently is the ONLY HD that is installed on this computer. The kicker to all of this is that the original SATA HD that eventually failed never gave me any of these installation problems, so I don't believe that it is related to SATA problems on the MB.

Any ideas/suggestions on what God I can sacrifice to in order to get this thing bootable??? :hotouch: Thank you in advance.

Fuzzylogik

Does the BIOS actually try to boot from the drive? Maybe you have to tell it to boot from SATA? Did you perform the fixboot and fixmbr procedures with only the SATA drive attached too?

I have tried to boot the SATA drivers at the f6 prompt when XP is loading -- to no avail. I'm not sure if I know how to answer if it actually attempts to boot from the drive. Basically, at the handshake when the BIOS hands over control to the OS, I virtually immediately receive the error. If a CD is in the drive (ie XP OS), it will give be five seconds to manually select whether I want to boot from the CD. If I let the timeout go uninterrupted (to boot to CD) it immediately gives me the "Error loading Operating System" and stops, so in a sense it does not appear to attempt to boot. Yet the BIOS indicates that it is the Master SATA and is indeed the only HD in the computer.

I cannot tell you how many times I have loaded OS's onto computers (literally hundreds if not thousands of times) and I have never seen anything like this. My gut instinct is that it is another failed HD, yet it can be written to, and I suspect that if I slaved it, it would work fine in that capacity right now (based on previous experience with the drive). It just does not want to boot for some reason.

Fuzzylogik