Upgrade from IDE to SATA results in no boot

SilverHair · Just got here...

Hi folks

Greetings from a newbie to the forum. I've looked through the posts but can't see a suitable answer to my problem, so any help would be much appreciated.

MSI K7N2 Delta 2 Platinum, 1.7 Athlon, 512Mb, 60Gb IDE HDD. Windows 2000.

I am trying to upgrade to a Samsung Spinpoint 500Gb SATA drive. I've cloned the old drive to the SATA several times using several disk copy programs (Acronis, Paragon etc) and although the clone process works fine, I'm always left with a SATA drive that won't boot. It shows up in Windows and can be used as a normal drive but it doesn't show up in the BIOS. I've tried enabling/disabling RAID in the BIOS, no luck.

I installed Windows to the SATA drive as an experiment, doing the F6 thing several times and experimented with different drivers (RAID, Storage Controller etc) but the resulting drive wouldn't boot and refused to show up in the BIOS.

I'm now thoroughly confused as to exactly which drivers I should be using, and how to install them to the old drive before cloning (assuming that's what I should do).

I've installed all the latest mobo drivers and BIOS update from MSI's site.

Any ideas, anyone?
TIA
Paul

JTKWalesUK1981 · nForce Aware

the clone i would have thought would be down to drivers, as for the direct install not working then i have no idea why that shouldnt work.

The drivers u should be using are the sata boot drivers MSI has them downloadable from their website.

Just boot from windows disk, click F6 install the drivers and away to go its so easy thats what i did and worked fine.

Im just wondering of the 500GB drive not showing is a SATA Bios prob as ive read in some places b4 about some people having trouble configuring SATA Drivers above 320GB or even some above 200GB.

Phaps as a long shot flash the SATA Bios or maybe just buy a SATA bootable PCI Card.

uddarts · nForce Aware

is it a sata II(300) by chance?

did you jumper it to a sata(150)?

also going to a large hard drive, you will need to enable lba.

http://www.48bitlba.com/enablebiglbatool.htm

you might want to run in it on the original drive before cloning it to the lge drive. that would be playing it safe.

ud

SilverHair · Just got here...

Thanks for the replies, guys.
Big LBA is already enabled, and yes I used Samsung's own utility to change the drive from 3 to 1.5.

Here's what I did tonight:
Disconnected old IDE drive. Commenced Win2k installation from CD drive.
Added the MSI SATA driver (Promise FastTrak 376) using F6.
Chose to format new drive when prompted.
At the end, removed the floppy and rebooted.
When reboot started, up came Nvidia Boot Agent showing "Client Mac Addr... " etc. followed by PXE-E53 "No boot filename received" then PXE-MOF "Exiting Boot Agent" and "DISK BOOT FAILURE".

I thought for a while and in desperation enabled RAID in the BIOS. The new SATA drive showed in the RAID BIOS as ID1, Healthy, Stripe, Adaptor 1 Channel 1 465GB.
I then pressed Ctrl-X to exit and got "Could not read from the selected boot disk, check boot path and disk hardware".

When I reconnected the old IDE driver and restarted Windows, the SATA drive was sitting there as drive H and I can see all the files installed by Windows Setup. But it just won't boot.

My gut feeling is that there's a simple solution, but a week of experimenting has failed to find it.

Is it time to get a more grown-up mobo?

Paul

uddarts · nForce Aware

in the good faith attempt at a simple answer: Very Happy

you built the single drive array first?

http://hardware.mcse.ms/archive10-2005-8-227958.html

is the boot priority set to scsi?

ud

SilverHair · Just got here...

Well, I tried to make this work in so many ways and eventually gave up. It made more sense to replace the mobo, so that's what I did. All working now. Thanks to all for your help. Sometimes a man has to realise when enough is enough!

Paul