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Alchemist.josh
07-08-08, 10:14 PM
maybe someone here can help me out. i have a sata HDD on my PC with win XP SP3 (booting from said sata hdd) and for some reason, my computer will not boot unless i have another HDD hooked up to it.(i only have pata drives, usb does not work) i would like to know why it wont boot unless i have another HDD hooked up. it doen not matter what HDD it is, there just has to be one.

other info:
MSI k8n neo4-f mother board
amd 3200+ socket 939 64 bit processor
radeon x1600 video card
2 gigs of value select ram by corsair

thanks for helping, Joshua
Alchemist.josh
07-09-08, 08:10 PM
any one have any ideas? I know every one here is pretty good with computers, so I am assuming that someone will know what is going onwith my computer.
thideras
07-09-08, 08:11 PM
You say it does not boot, what messages does it give you?

Also, you need to remove that link in the sig, it is not allowed ;)
madhatter256
07-09-08, 08:42 PM
Probably because when you installed it, XP has a nack for installing the NTLDR, BOOT.INI, etc. onto the very first PATA drive it detects, especially if that drive was previously formatted into NTFS.

I've ran into this problem before and it is a pain in the ass to reconfigure. What I ended up doing was simply reinstalling XP from scratch onto the SATA hdd WITHOUT THE OTHER HDD plugged in, so then it is the only hdd connected. Then I set the BIOS to boot directly from the SATA HDD, nothing else. When I got XP running I then hooked up the HDD back (with the PC shut down, of course, and then turned on) I copied the data from the other HDD over to the new install. Then I deleted the partition in the second HDD.

After all of that, I was then able to boot up to XP with or without that second HDD installed in the PC.
thideras
07-09-08, 08:45 PM
You could also try leaving just that drive in, booting to the Windows disc and get into the recovery console. When you get to the command line, type "fixmbr" (no quotes) and restart.
Rich'[ard]
07-09-08, 09:41 PM
make sure your drive is in the 1st Sata port?
when i put the sata cable into my other sata ports it would not boot.