SATA and IDE

Anybody know how to configure the bios to see an IDE hard drive and an SATA hard drive? I have an SATA hard drive with a corrupted OS and I want to get the data off of it. I have an IDE drive with Windows XP that I want to put into the system as the primary drive and access the data on the SATA (which should automatically config as the secondary drive). In the bios it tells me that the IDE drive is first primary master, my IDE cd rom is second primary master, and my SATA drive is third primary master. When I attempt to boot, after POST it goes to a screen saying that Windows did not open correctly, asking if I want to go into Safe Mode, Last Known Good, etc...you know the screen. When I make a choice, the system just goes back to POST and loops.

The thing that confuses me is that I know the IDE drive is functional because I use it in a different system. I thought that it would at least let me go into safe mode and let me move files from one drive to another. The reason I have to put the working drive into the other system is because I don't have SATA on the system that works. Is there a step that I'm missing? Any suggestions would help. Thanks.

 

Is it possible that the system is trying to boot from an OS that resides on the SATA drive?

Check the boot order in your BIOS. Also, unplug the SATA drive and see if you can boot, as a test.

 

Sounds like its booting from the IDE drive alright. If you've moved that drive from another computer, you won't be able to boot Windows. Unless the machine you took it from was completley identical, you have no hope of booting it.

You'll need to get a blank IDE drive and put Windows on that when booting from a CD on the target machine (otherwise it won't correctly detect your hardware).

An alternative is to boot to XP CD on the target machine and perform a "repair install" to reconfigure XP on the IDE drive for the new hardware. That option you won't lose any data on the IDE drive (in theory).

Once you can boot to the IDE drive, THEN plug in the SATA drive and try to salvage the data from it. Otherwise you'll have trouble installing/repairing Windows on the IDE drive.

It is, of course, possible to boot to a CD which supports SATA drives and NTFS file system (presuming thats what you were using) and copy the data across. But that might be a little too envolved to be worth it.

 

Yeah, it's definitely booting from the IDE. It's going to be a pain, but I think I do have to format another IDE drive with XP and boot to that. I don't want to try the XP repair on the drive for my other system because I don't want to be left with 2 screwed up systems if something goes wrong.

The other drives that I have are small, so I guess the setup will be:

Primary Master:Low capacity IDE drive with fresh XP install jumpers set as Master
Primary Slave:80gb IDE drive for data transfer jumpers set as Slave
Secondary Master:IDE DVD-RW drive jumpers set as Master
Third Master:120gb SATA drive

And I will unplug the SATA drive and boot into windows before I attempt to boot with the drive in. How's that sound?

 

Sounds like a plan

good luck!

 

Cool, thanks for the advice. I'll update as soon as I try it and get my systems back together!

 

Sorry I took so long to update. Sometimes the easiest solution is right in front of your eyes. After installing XP with the new drive, I realized I could just leave the installation on that drive and just have 2 drives in there and access my SATA as the slave drive. When I get more time I may install XP on the SATA drive again because it's so much faster, but for now I can get to everything my system is up and running. Thanks for the advice goldfish.

 

No probs mate, glad to hear you got it sorted