Making my Sata drive the boot drive instead of the IDE

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M

Mashkai

Reputable
Sep 4, 2014
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0
4,510
My old HDD went kablooey so I grabbed up two of the larger ones I had in a box, formatted em, installed windows and called it a day. However, in my rush I didn't note the speeds of said HDD's. (or lack thereof) I made the 150 GB IDE the boot drive with a copy of win8 and the 320 GB SATA became the secondary. Now, its become very very obvious that the IDE drive is really really slow. I put the jumper on the IDE to cable select, changed the boot order, and installed Windows onto the SATA drive. I'd like to still use the smaller drive for storage but...no matter what I do or what settings I change, the computer will -not- boot from the SATA drive if the IDE is plugged in. What am I missing here?
 
Solution
WyomingKnott
When you install Windows into a machine that already has a Windows-bootable drive, it uses the existing boot area and just installs the Windows software in the partition on the new disk. It does not build a bootable drive on the new disk.

The up-front solution to this is to have only one drive connected to the system when you do an installation. The install process will see no boot drives and build the only drive on the system into a boot drive.

Depending on the version of Windows, it's possible to fix this by removing all but the SATA drive and doing a Repair Installation after booting from the Windows media, assuming that you have actual Windows distros and not some manufacturer factory restore disk. Try that.

So what you are...
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WyomingKnott

WyomingKnott

Legenda in Aeternum
Aug 29, 2006
13,249
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51,960
When you install Windows into a machine that already has a Windows-bootable drive, it uses the existing boot area and just installs the Windows software in the partition on the new disk. It does not build a bootable drive on the new disk.

The up-front solution to this is to have only one drive connected to the system when you do an installation. The install process will see no boot drives and build the only drive on the system into a boot drive.

Depending on the version of Windows, it's possible to fix this by removing all but the SATA drive and doing a Repair Installation after booting from the Windows media, assuming that you have actual Windows distros and not some manufacturer factory restore disk. Try that.

So what you are missing is a boot sector on the SATA drive. Good luck.
 
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