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
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.

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