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General discussion

IDE slave SATA master

Mar 15, 2007 9:44AM PDT

I know this has been beat to death but my issue isn't showing up in a search. I have a new Gateway GT5404 which came with a 250 gib SATA drive. (Pretty sure it's a western digital). If it's important the new OS is Vista.

My old computer had a 120 gig IDE hard drive (Maxtor) with lots of my data on it still in 3 logical drives. I want to put that hard drive into my new computer. This particular drive was a slave in the old system so while it once had an OS on it (win2k)it was deleted when I made that drive my slave in the old computer.

I purchased an IDE controller and put the IDE drive in my new computer. The IDE was set as a slave -- though it was the only drive on the ribbon cable so it was connected on the end of the cable. I understand that SATA drives don't have Master/Slave designations.

I booted my computer and I guess the old drive had some hidden system files or a boot manager on it because during boot it would tell me ntldr wasn't found then it would boot from the sata drive. Once into Windows everything was fine.

I wanted to get rid of the ntldr error and hence my troubles began. I moved everything from the first logical drive on the IDE drive and reformatted it.

When I rebooted, "BOOTMGR not found. Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart."

I double checked my jumper settings on the IDE -- set for slave.

I went into my BIOS to take the IDE out of the boot sequence. It seems I can change the boot sequence in a limited manner. I can make the CD/DVD drives come before or after the hard drives, but I cannot change the order of the hard drives themselves so that the SATA Drive is in the boot sequence before the IDE drive.

Additionally, since I reformatted the first logical drive on the IDE drive, it won't attempt to boot from the SATA drive after a boot from the IDE drive fails.

Additional information that might be important (I'm not sure if it is). My motherboard only had the one IDE controller. That is full with the CD drive and with the DVD drive. I purchased an IDE controller (which Vista found and installed the software for without any input from me). The new controller has a primary and secondary IDE slot. I attempted to plug the new ribbon cable into each one while trying to troubleshoot.

At this point I'm lost. Is there something I'm overlooking or can I just not have the SATA as "master" and the IDE as "slave" (just using the old terminology here to make my issue more clear)?

Thanks for making it this far.

Discussion is locked

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I wouldn't do that (slave and no master.)
Mar 15, 2007 11:08AM PDT

That's flighty from what I've experienced. I'm sure someone has it working all the time but I run into issues with this but keep in mind no one brings me a machine to show it working...

On old dusty PATA IDE I'd stick with the standards. A master first, then the slave on each channel starting with the primary and then the secondary.

As to the SATA connections I hope you didn't accidently toast the Vista install. What happens if we unplug the PATA IDE stuff?

Bob

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follow up
Mar 15, 2007 11:19AM PDT

If I unplug the IDE drive everything loads as normal. Nothing is toasted -- yet. *laugh* But my install disks are close by.

I wonder...if I load win2k on the PATA if I can get it to work with a dual boot configuration. I suppose that's a question for a different forum.

I'm just really frustrated because I want both drives without doing a huge reinstall. I'll look again tomorrow but I think this SATA drive has the old IDE type connections, too.

Does anyone know the down side of going that route?

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OK, that's better.
Mar 15, 2007 11:34AM PDT

I bet this is that old BIOS boot selection issue. Some BIOS's didn't handle this but are you saying you installed a PATA IDE board? If so, some have a setting or ROM on them as well.

Make and model could help me find out if it has such a feature.

In the meantime try making the PATA IDE drive partition INACTIVE with DISKPART.

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/ca099518-dde5-4eac-a1f1-38eff6e3e5091033.mspx?mfr=true

Look at inactive (the command) and do some research on this with google such as http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=make+partition+inactive&btnG=Google+Search

If I were to do this I'd power down, unplug my SATA to be sure I didn't inactive the wrong drive.

Bob

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thanks
Mar 15, 2007 12:18PM PDT

I'll have to look more into this. I've never heard of DiskPart before. My initial question is whether or not this would work since my system won't boot at all when the PATA drive is installed and hooked up since it has no OS. Or does it work like the old FDISK so that one can use it without having load the OS first?

The controller I bought was CompUSA's own brand. It's the Ultra ATA/133 PCI Card (SKU: 293595).

I will say that while I'm pretty confident in my abilities to understand software and troubleshoot that, I'm probably going to be asking a lot of silly hardware type questions because this just isn't my forte. I really appreciate your time.

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I'll write yes.
Mar 15, 2007 12:25PM PDT

By marking the disk partition inactive it (the BIOS) should not try to boot that drive. But then again I have to see if I can find this part's manual to go see if there is some BIOS on said card and if there is some other issue here.

DISKPART showed up in 2000 with... Windows 2000. Now on XP, etc.

Bob

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very interesting
Mar 15, 2007 1:23PM PDT

I'll try to make the partition on the PATA drive inactive tomorrow, but DiskPart looks like it may be my answer to another issue I have -- wanting to partition the drive that came with the computer without reformatting and deleting partitions.

I'll report back after I give it a try.

Thanks.

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I have hard drive joy
Mar 16, 2007 6:08AM PDT

It's an embarassing solution but before that.

I reinstalled the controller card and hooked everything up again with the plan to try the DiskPart option. But before that, I wanted to try the bios one more time.

I was able to change it today whereas I wasn't yesterday. This is why it's embarassing, yesterday I only tried to use the + and - from the number keypad because I never think of the ones in the main part of the keyboard. When I thought, "Hey I should try the other "-"" it worked. *rolling eyes*

This has been an enlightening problem though because I've learned about DiskPart. Being able to shrink a volume while (theoretically) not losing any data is the perfect solution to another dilemma I was facing.

Thanks so much.

Lesley

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And that makes it worth the journey.
Mar 16, 2007 8:32AM PDT

When we go on such jaunts we get to see new things.

Thanks for sharing the good end to this story.

Bob