My system is currently set with 2 sata drives and one IDE drive.
I am booting from the SATA drive that replaced the IDE drive.
I want to just yank the IDE drive out for it is no longer needed but there is
a problem when I do that. My System will not boot after I remove the ide drive.
Ive tried removing IDE boot options from the BIOS but it doesnt help.
the IDE drive has some dumped stuff on it and is clear of any system files.
The SATA drives are connected to an PCI controller not to the board directly.
Could this be why i need to use an IDE device to boot

How can I get the system to boot from the SATA without having to have an IDE drive
connected.

My guess is you need to get your Sata controller drivers installed before you can boot to them. Your board doesn't have on board Sata?

the controller drivers are installed...The machine boots and runs
just fine as a long as I have an IDE drive hooked up..
Its almost like without the IDE drive as a master drive
it will not see the sata drives as master....either that the boot
sequence I am picking in the bios is not right.

its a pretty old mobo, 478 chipset like 4-5 years old at least so there
are no onboard SATA...

Have you looked in your boot disk priority? (or something named like that) My mobo has both sata and ide and I had a problem like yours too. I didn't even have an IDE hdd only one sata and still I couldn't boot.

What I had to do is find the setting that lists your HDD in order that you want them to boot in, default IDE is first because they were the main type of HDD a few years back, as I'm sure you know.

Anyway when I set my bios to boot from sata 1 first (the sata port my hdd was hooked up to yours may be different) it fixed my problem.

What happens if you unplug the IDE drive completely can you boot from windows DVD and hit F6 load your drivers and continue on?

I dont know it might be hard to boot from sata if your bios doent have a sata option in it. Your card might not load its drivers until windows actually starts up.

I think its about time for an upgrade.

The boot sequence does not have a SATA option...
I can choose only ide 0-1-2 or 3, a scsi device, a cd drive boot, or floppy
and some LAN. thats how old the MOBO is...
remember ...the SATA is not on the mobo...its on a PCI controller card.

thats kinda what I am thinking....but trying to prolong this one as long as possible...
its not killing me to have an IDE drive connected ...just seeing if this was normal and
wanted if possible to disco the ide

thanks though for your assistance!!!

Im pretty sure the cards drivers dont load until Windows starts so you cant use the sata drives to boot from. You can get a way better computer for $500.00 or less. What size are your sata drives? I would be happy to build you a kickass sytem for $500.00 or less.

Hows a 3.3 GHZ core 2 duo with 2 gigs of ram and windows vista ultimate and office 2007 sound? With your drives I could get you in for $500.00 on the button.

If your SATA controller has it's own BIOS you should be able to set it up so that you can boot from a SATA drive without an IDE drive in your PC.

Important: Special note for users of a RAID host adapter. Many SATA RAID host adapters require that a drive be assigned to an array before it will allow the operating system to see the drive. See the host adapter's documentation to determine how to assign the drive to an array.