Some HD advice please...?

[Il Padrino]

Hi,

I am new to Techspot as a member, but glad I have found it

Firstly, I have 2 x SATA drives: 1 x 80Gb (Call it A for now)
1 x 200Gb (Call it B for now)

..on an Asus A7N8XE-Deluxe

Am running XP Pro SP1, with SL3 (Computer Audio & Sequencing program) as my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) on A.

Have attempted to install a normal ATA IDE drive, to back up a ghost image of the OS on. I have set it as slave, and have formatted it as a DYNAMIC disk on my other general PC.

When I add it to the system above, upon boot up I get : Error Loading OS....

Before I set it as a dynamic disk, I formatted it as a normal Basic Disc, Primary drive.... When I added it to the system above then, boot up showed "NTLDR missing". I'd had problems with NTLDR way back on my general PC and do not want to get involved with that again. Sorted it, but took me 2 days. Hence, the change to dynamic disk.

I have since reformatted the drive completely again in my general PC, set to a Basic Logical disk. It runs fine and has no errors in the general system.

As soon as I try to add it to my DAW system as described above, Error Loading OS appears each time. I have placed the drive as Primary Master, Slave, Secondary Master Slave, on both IDE channels, but always the same response.

I get the feeling that as I'm running from SATA drives which aren't recognised by the BIOS, then that may have something to do with it?

Can anyone spot something obvious that I am doing, or not doing as the case may be?

Thanks for any info and input in advance.

Il Padrino.

 

[Didou]

What is the 1st boot device set to ? SCSI ?

 

[RealBlackStuff]

You need to check the Boot order in BIOS.
In the newest BIOS, SATA is shown as SATA, in older ones, it's shown as SCSI.
The latest BIOS for that board is 1013.

You could also try making the partition you do NOT want to boot "not
active" that *should* stop it from booting.

 

[Il Padrino]

I thank you both! :grinthumb

It was indeed a Boot up choice setting. I'd completely forgotten ( as it's a while since I installed the system / OS ) that you have a choice of SCSI for SATA's. I was indeed about to update the BIOS to the latest, but the improvements from my version (penultimate) have no relevance to my setup, just to do with a certain memory and speech option??

My first Boot choice was CD, then floppy, then other. I'd forgotten that you had a priority choice for 'other'. I thought that it was automatically searching 'other', which it was infact, and found the IDE new blank drive prior to the SATA (which I now see as SCSI ).

Thank you both. Having joined the forum, within 30 mins, you have solved my problem.

I'll be back to see if I can help others out also in the future.

Grazie mille,

Il Padrino