Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[Whoamiii111]

so I got an old Seagate IDE HDD, ST3200822A, and new WD SATA. I want to give the SATA drive to my mom's broken PC, but my PC will NOT let me boot from the Seagate one. it just says "BOOTMGR not found".

now I used my Windows 7 disk to repair, it repaired it but only for the SATA drive. everytime I try booting up from Seagate, it keeps saying the same error above. what do I do? i am frustrated because my PC will not work unless I have 2 HDDs connected to it and I gotta let one go.

I got W7 and Ubuntu on Seagate as bootup OSs, and W7, Vista, and XP on SATA drive.

[Cantbecanit]

Wrong chipset drivers installed on the ide drive for mums MB.

And set the boot order in the bios to boot the HDD with the O/S on it, you can test method this first, at boot time tap F12 repeatedly and when the menu pops up select HDD and then the model HDD you want to boot from.

[Whoamiii111]

I dont understand what you mean? wrong ide driver for "mums MB"? i checked both of my HDDs and their drivers are up to date. do i gotta update the mobo driver?

and i already played with boot order in bios. that has nothing to do with it AND I got OSs on both HDDs and thats why it gets confusing.

[Cantbecanit]

No you don't follow me...

Your PC may have an Award bios, where mums has a Via one, the two don't talk and you get no boot, it's like gassing up a petrol car with diesel, PC drivers aren't a one fits all thing and you must have the correct ones installed.

If you are mixing sata and ide drives you must have both controllers enabled in the bios as well, but this will also need F12 at boot time to tell the PC to boot from the correct drive

Have you tried booting the ide without the sata drive connected?

If you have and bootmanager missing is coming up the O/S is dead normally, or the bios isn't configured properly, or the drive isn't connected properly, one thing I can think of is if you have AHCi enabled and run an ide drive it won't boot you need to turn it back to ide.

If this isn't sorting it can you post some more details of yours and mums machines, I can't guess and there are so many different PC's in the world that simply a HDD number and Win 7 isn't helping much.

[Whoamiii111]

so i played around in BIOS and found under "IDE Control" AHCI. I chose that, restarted and tried booting into the windows that's messed up. I got the BSOD before even booting into windows. so I put the option back to Native IDE. what happens under this default is the Windows 7 gets booted and stuck on "Preparing Windows" and then after like 5 mins once it gets into it it says "This os is not genuine" which exactly says for my Vista on a diff. partition since I havent activated it yet. now this has been happening with my 7 being messed up when I used Norton Ghost to backup the same partition. but when I copied this 7 partition onto ANOTHER partition, and it just wouldnt work. it would give me that same error. So i thought huh.. ill just format it. i couldnt because weirdly, Norton Ghost made it so that the non-working partition made it primary. in other words, the windows thought thats the windows that is being ran atm when it wasnt. so I formatted it from booting from another OS. but once i tried booting my 7 that normally worked (nothing has been messed with), it started acting the same way the cloned partition by Norton has been acting.

in conclusion, i had already 2 people tell me Norton Ghost messed up my system and i believe them. i dont know why it messed things up making my system think something completely unnecessary. it linked my OSs amongst the partitions and confused the entire process. good thing I didnt pay for it and was on trial.

[Cantbecanit]

Those two ppl are giving you very good advice, Norton etc are the worst things a man can ever do to a PC, use a free one called Avast, if not AVG, both are excellent and free.

To use AHCi you have to install the O/S with it enabled, however if you have Vista or 7 you can hack enable it in the registry, just google how to enable AHCi in Windows registry, change the 3 to a 0 where it tells you to, re-boot and enable AHCi in the bios, then re-boot again and Windows will load and load the drivers once you see the desktop, hth for the future.

[Whoamiii111]

what if i have IDE HDD and want to keep Ubuntu (Linux) OS on it? would that effect things if i changed BIOS to AHCI? i may also put XP on my old IDE Seagate HDD.

I just purchased a SATAIII 1TB Seagate, 64 mb cache, 7200RPM. will use this as my main Windows 7 bootup drive.

[Cantbecanit]

Can't really help further until I know what the PC's specs are.

I will tell you this though, AHCi in XP only works if you install with it activated in the bios and you will need either a slipstreamed copy of XP or a floppy disk with a sata driver on it.

[Whoamiii111]

my spec:

AMD Athlon II X2 255 Regor 3.1GHz Socket AM3 65W
Foxconn A76ML-K
ECS NR9800GTE-512QX-F GeForce 9800 GT 512MB 256-bit DDR3
A-DATA 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
CORSAIR CMPSU-400CX 400W
200G Seagate IDE - Ubuntu Linux installed
1TB Seagate SATA III, 64mb cache, 7200rpm, 6.0Gbp/s - will have 7 installed on it

what if i image my backup of XP after installing 7 using AHCI? will that work?

[Cantbecanit]

I don't think it will tbh, your system looks healthy enough as well.

Now I'm going to suggest the quickest route to a resolution here because I think somewhere in your PC's history is going to trip you up if we continue to try to fit a pacemaker.

If you don't have a floppy drive you will need to make a slipstream disc for XP, I assume you have an XP set up disc still?

Get this and install it on your current O/S

http://www.nliteos.com/

Next read and do this

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/how_to_slipstream_windows_xp_sp3_and_vista_sp1

Install all the sata drivers where it tells you into your slipstream disk, only trouble is I can't find a pre-install driver for your board, it is supported though read page 37 of the manual below

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/driverdownload/Motherboard/AMD/Socket%20AM3/A76ML-K%203.0/Manual/Engli...

It maybe in with the raid driver,

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/driverdownload/Motherboard/Driver/Raid/CSD_SW-AMD-RAID-3.1.1540.127-Wi...

Anyway, hopefully you've made a slipstream disk now and burned it to a CD

Now in the bios turn on AHCi mode and make the DVD the 1st boot device, if not hold F12 and select it

When XP gets to the format page make your partitions for each O/S you want on that disk

Load XP and do the usual drivers etc

Reboot when finished and put the next O/S set up disk in and select which partition to load on to, do this for each O/S and you should have a drive with F12 selectable booting for each O/S

Next I would format that ide drive and start fresh with it, if you have an ide dvd drive set that to slave and the HD to master on the jumpers

If you still can't see the ide drive then you may not be able to run both Sata and IDE at the same time, which the next best thing is to get an external case for it and usb it

HTH.