XP on SATA drive & FAT32

[ouwedibbes]

During my reinstallation (clean install) of XP on my new SATA HDD I have run into a small problem. XP was previously installed on an IDE HDD, but now on a faster SATA drive partition. During installation XP created a FAT32 partition on the IDE drive, it said it was needed.

All went okay, rest of partitions are NTFS, and XP was running. But then I decided to delete the FAT32 because I wanted it to be one big drive again. Know XP cant boot, I think because it is not able of finding my SATA drive, cant select it in BIOS (I did not alter anything there), the only change I can think of is the removal of the active FAT32 drive, and setting the SATA drive to be active as well.

Does the problem lies in the BIOS, or should I recreate a small (8MB) FAT32 drive again on the IDE drive where XP was installed on previously? Or should I set my SATA drive to be primary (and how do I do this)?

At this moment I can only do a reboot after POST screen flashed by, or launch anything from the DVD drive, so I have access to Norton Partiotion Manager.

Any missing information can of course be provided, drive management is a big lack in my knowledge, I hope someone can lead me in the right direction.

 

[Nodsu]

The problem is with your BIOS.. The IDE drive is assigned as drive 0, which is the only drive BIOS knows how to boot from. You could look around for some options to give your SATA drive a higher priority.

 

[ouwedibbes]

Could be right, but can you explain this:

Before the FAT32 partition was deleted, it easily started from the SATA drive, no BIOS changes were involved. The only thing happened was the removal of the FAT32 partition on the previous system drive (IDE), primary disk, called active in Norton Partition Magic.

 

[Nodsu]

That's because the Windows bootloader files were on that FAT32 partition.

 

[Rik]

If you remove the ata and do a windows install with just the sata plugged in that should fix the problem. Just remember to change the boot order after putting the ata back in!!!!

 

[ouwedibbes]

So the only solution is reinstalling XP? Isn't it easier to recreate the drive with the drivers? Or (re)install the drivers?

 

[Rik]

You wont be able to get it working without reinstalling windows anyhow, unless yo know how to manually create a boot sector and all the boot instructions!!!!

 

[bushwhacker]

or you can unplug the sata and throw it out ^^

ha.

You can try and unplug the SATA from SATA0 or SATA1 and plug it in other number such as SATA1 instead SATA0.

Or it might be your faulty SATA cables. You can download and boot the hard drive diagnosis.

Installing and running Windows Xp on FAT32 is NOT RECOMMENDED. It is a mandatory to put it on NTFS for maximum stability.