Booting WinXP from a SATA drive?

[mkuebeler]

Is it possible to have WinXP Pro (SP2) boot from a SATA drive with a several year's old motherboard, specifically an ASUS A8V Deluxe? I'm trying to install WinXP on a SATA hard drive, and while I can get as far as creating the primary partition, formatting, and initial installation of files (I supply the VIA SATA drivers by floppy during setup), when it comes time to reboot the computer from the hard drive to continue installation I get a message about Windows not dectecting any bootable device. I set the primary boot drive to "VIA 1st HDD" or something like that, but the computer doesn't seem to be able to boot from it. I have an IDE drive which has been the boot drive for this system, I would like to use it as a secondary drive (or even take it out entirely), and this has been disconnected during my attempts at set up. There is a BIOS setting for "OnChip SATA Boot ROM", which I've tried enabling, but it doesn't seem to help matters, and frankly, I'm not even sure what it does! The SATA drive is detected just fine by my current WinXP installation, so I know the drive is working OK.

Thanks!

Mark Kuebeler

 

[joke]

You probably have an existing, bootable partition on your IDE drive which you will need to remove. Most Intel MBs want to boot from the first bootable IDE drive they find. Early during install process you will have the option of deleting and creating partitions, if you don't care about saving the data on your IDE drive, I would just delete the partition on that drive and create a new system partition on your SATA drive. After you have installed XP on your SATA system and it is running you can later create a new partition on the old IDE drive.

If you do not want to use the older drive, you need to set up a multi-boot environment and just boot from the newly installed system.

In most cases and if you have an existing, bootable IDE drive, Windows will try to boot first from that drive. You need to either clobber the MBR on the IDE drive or just delete its existing partition.

Good luck,
Joe

 

[MCGTech]

Try enabling the SATA boot rom and then repartition/format and reinstall windows to the drive. Do use the drivers on the floppy and leave the IDE disconnected until you have the booting sorted out.

 

[MCGTech]

Do you have the manual for your mobo? It may be that with the boot rom enabled, you have to press F6, F9, ctrl-s or something of the sort to enter the SATA Bios. Yours may require that you use the bios's utility to partition and format the drive for it to boot properly. Also, be sure neither bios has raid functionality enabled.