SATA Problems

I had a buddy who lives some distance away call me for advice about his Dell box. He has a desktop with 2 SATA drives, one with windows installed and one for data storage. Apparently his windows drive went bad. He goes out and buys another SATA drive , installs it, loads XP on it with his Dell restore disc, and boots. It gives him a no boot device available error. He goes back into the bios and disables the data drive and reboots. Bingo: it boots into Windows. He turns it off, enables the second drive, starts it up and again he gets the error. According to him, he has adjusted no other bios setting and only replaced the bad drive, plugging it into the same cable the original drive was plugged into. Any ideas on what the problem may be?

 

Maybe it's booting from the sata drive that windows isn't installed onto to?

I would tell him to have both drives on and check the device boot priority in the bios and make sure it doesn't boot from the non windows drive.

 

My thought was since it is a brand new installation I would just unplug the secondary drive and re-install. That way all the boot files go on the correct drive. He can then reconnect the secondary drive and it should be recognized by Windows as secondary with no further boot issues.