Questions about hard drives

[Comp_Newbie]

First of all, can you have 1 SATA drive and 1 PATA hard drive running on the same system?

Also, I tried formatting a HD today and putting XP home on it, it formatted well and installed all the files well but when I tried to start up my system it said DISC BOOT ERROR - INSTALL SYSTEM DISC AND PRESS ENTER or something along those lines. Even with the windows XP disc in, it wouldn't start up. I went into BIOS and fixed the boot order but that didn't do anything

 

[Nodsu]

Yes, you can have SATA and PATA working simultaneously. You may get serious booting issues though. Some BIOSes enumerate hard drives in strict order and you may be forced to boot only from the PATA or only from the SATA because the BIOS has decided to prefer one over the other.

This may be the problem in your case too. Perhaps you installed XP to the PATA drive, but the BIOS tries to boot from SATA?

 

[Comp_Newbie]

I don't have SATA and PATA running at the mo, just trying to use PATA. Maybe it wants to boot from SATA but I don't have one connected or something.

 

[Nodsu]

No.. When it only has PATA, then it should boot from it.

What was on the hard drive previously? Windows is not very good at working with partition tables altered by other systems. Maybe try writing zeroes to the beginning of the drive (any disk wiping or "low level format" utility running up to 1% will do) to clean out any previous mess?