Want to make new SATA drive the boot drive

I recently upgraded my computer with a new MB, cpu, video card and a 200GB Maxtor Diamondmax SATA150 drive. I ghosted my existing HD with my OS on it to the new drive. The drive seems to work fine, everything copied over as it should, it's detected by BIOS and windows XP correctly and you can access it through windows. A small odd issue it has is when plugged into the #1 SATA slot of the MB(there are 4), everything except BIOS lists it as being plugged into the 3rd slot. Interestiingly, BIOS lists the 4 SATA slots in this order(3, 4, 1, 2). I don't think this makes any differance though since a SATA drive is automatically a master. However, it will not let me boot from the drive. I have 3 hard drives in my computer right now, 2 ATA and 1 SATA. The drive was a OEM drive so I downloaded the Maxblast software from the maxtor website. You can get the windows version of the program and a .ISO file to create a bootable CD. When I try booting from the CD it doesn't give me the options to setup the SATA drive, or any drive really. The windows version of the program works but I was thinking since it was trying to copy everything while windows was running, it may not have been able to copy anything and that's why I'm getting the error I'm getting which is "Error loading OS" after BIOS screen. I've done some reading and tried a few things like unplugging my ATA drives, running fixmbr and fixboot from the XP recovery console. I downloaded True Image 7 and am going to try ghosting with that program to see if it works.

Does anyone have any info on what my problem is? I'm completely stumped and violent images of me throwing my computer off tall buildings are running through my head. My MB is a Asus A8N5X. My hard drive is a Maxtor 6L200SO SATA1.5 200GB. My old ATA drives are both Maxtor drives as well, 60GB and 80GB respectively. Again, my computer runs fine when I boot from my old drive, I can use my new SATA drive, I just cannot boot from it. I would like to do this because my 80GB boot drive right now feels like it only moves at 2 RPMs. I've defragged it. It's 2 years old and I think it's just starting to crap the bed.

 

When using Maxblast to copy Drive Image you have to select Advance Options in HDD setup & select option to copy a bootable drive
I forget the exact steps but here's two Options for coping a HDD Image one is Bootable one is Not

Other thought might be BIOS setting
Ya might try different SATA port on the MOBO

 

Are you talking about the section where you tell it whether to setup the new drive as additional storage or as a new boot device? I always select new boot device. There is only the primary partition on my old drive and I wanted to keep it that way on the new. The old one is 80GB and the new one is 200GB.

I may try switching the cable port on the MB. I've combed through every inch of my BIOS multiple times, I'm pretty sure it's not there.

 

Oh, one thing I should mention too. At one point today in my troubleshooting, I ran Fdisk of the windows 98 install CD. All my drives including my new one are FAT32. When viewing my new 200gb SATA drive, it didn't list the size correctly at all and said that the file system was unknown. I'm thinking that is most likely because the drive is too new for that old version of the program to be compatible. Not sure if that plays into anything but figured I'd mention it.

 

I'm going to wander off of track a bit here
Your OS is XP?
I'd suggest running NTFS file system, it way better more secure more efficient than Fat file system
Sometimes there's nothing a Fresh Brand Spanking New Clean Install of windows

Once your problem is solved you can convert Fat to NTFS but to gain all the benefit's of NTFS you need to Format do Fresh install of Windows

Somewhere around MG is a recent thread about Fat & NTFS file systems

 

I was going to have dual installs of windows but unfortunately for me, I must have been a little too careless with my XP CD and it is too scratched to install. I can get a replacement for 24 bucks from Microsoft and will probably do that soon. I've kept FAT32 so that I can boot to DOS if I want to. I've heard that you cannot do that with NTFS. I should probably check out that thread you mentioned.

 

Looking at your post again this might be your problem, I dont think you can copy a bootable image of Windows that your Booted to

You will have to boot to the Utility, did you try making the bootable floppy

Try starting over with the Utility, this is the one you Downloaded? what did you use to burn the ISO?
scroll down read the Instruction etc.
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...oftware+Downloads/Top+Downloads&downloadID=19

 

I used Nero to burn the .ISO I don't have a floppy disk drive in my computer but I do have a external USB floppy I could hook up. I'll try that now.

 

Just sort of an update on this. I figured out how to do the drive copy booting off the maxtor CD image I burned. The night before I defragged my boot drive. I ran the copy program today. First at 26% it told me a file(it was a .mpg file) could not be copied. Told me again at 31%, and it was another .mpg file. At that point I had to return to work and selected the option to not give those error messages anymore so that the copy would complete.

Not surprisingly, I still got the same "Error Loading OS" error. I even unplugged both of my old drives just to be safe. I'm guessing my boot drive must have some corrupted data somewhere that won't copy. The drive works fine as far as I can tell, I can access all my data on it from windows. I basically have two copies of my boot drive now, just that one doesn't boot.

In any case, I'm probably going to give up and pay Microsoft 24 bucks for a new XP cd. It's probably a good idea anyway. I kind of wanted a fresh install also, but I have some programs that I've either lost the install CD's for or the CD's are damaged and may not be able to install. On a brighter note, I'm buying another 1gb of RAM. That should ease the pain.

 

Two observations that may or may not be relevant, seeing as how I don't think we know exactly which operating system we're dealing with here...

Some versions of Windows do not provide support for the 48-bit addressing set up in the recent revisions (late 2002?) to the ATA hard drive standards. Without that support, the system cannot deal with a partition size larger than 137GB. You'll need WinXP SP1 or later to get past that limit.

And have you made sure that the cloned partition that you want to boot from has been marked "active"? That's necessary for a FAT boot partition, whether FAT16 or FAT32. If the partition is not marked active, it will not be seen as a bootable partition, and the OS will not load. FDISK will let you set a partition as "active", but I don't recall what impact that will have on whatever has been written to the partition -- if any.