My own advice not working - HELP

[Philgo]

Glad it worked OK in the end.

[Philgo]

Something has sprung to mind, not sure if applicable.
Have you considered that you may now be using the wrong SATA drivers, your Mobo bios might support SATA without using any drivers and you might get conflict with the Raid ones you installed during setup.

[Murf]

Well thanks for all the help will close this one out by:

Ordered and received a SATA/RAID PCI Card duh...ordered the wrong one don't need RAID. So RMA'd it and ordered a SATA PCI Card, be here tomorrow. I have determined that the motherboard supports SATA/RAID, but not SATA as a stand alone. It is booting fine (hangs every once in awhile at the XP Logo) setting it up as previously indicated as SATA/IDE. I uninstalled all SATA drivers, and still had the problem. So the SATA PCI card will do the trick as I am not going to set up an array. Keyboard problem fixed itself so assume it was not loading due to the problems with the BIOS finding the boot drive (SATA).

Hanging at the XP LOGO is baffling me as there are no errors in event logs, it does not do it everytime just once in awhile and when it does have to reboot several times. Then she loads. This started after installing the SATA drive, so we will see if the SATA PCI card fixes that. I went with a VANTEC SATA PCI Card .

Thanks again Philgo

[Murf]

For those interested my fix:


1. Installed a PCI SATA card (I chose a Vantec one). Booted up to windows XP (was booting using motherboard SATA, but took several times to get it).


2. Installed the drivers for the SATA Card, XP found new hardware came up and used it.

3. Removed the SCSI SATA drivers in Device Manager for the on-board SATA.

4. Shut down.

5. Unhooked both IDE HDD's (BTW: I had moved them IDE 1 to IDE 2 and had my burners hooked to IDE 1.) Only drive hooked up was the SATA to the SATA card. Also disabled on-board SATA in BIOS.

6. Went into BIOS and changed boot sequence to CDROM and booted from the XP CD (loaded the SATA drivers (F6)).

7. Entered the recovery consol and did a bootconfig /rebuild

8. Shut down

9. Hooked up both IDE HDD's and booted went into BIOS and disabled IDE#2 where the IDE HDD's were attached (disabled by switching from auto to NONE). Saved and Exit and it booted from the SATA.

10 .Windows XP new hardware came up and found both IDE Drives and installed them. Switched around my drive letters to my likening. Went into boot.ini, now had two entries (which were presented to me the last boot.) during the bootcfg /rebuild I did not enter any text so the boot.ini showed

1st line """"
2nd line ................"Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect/noexecute=optin

Changed it (which I could of done during the bootcfg /rebuild) to:


1st line:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=""SATA Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect/noexecute=optin

Removed the second line, so now it boots straight up without having to make a choice.

The key to my problem was removing the IDE drives in BIOS and letting Windows find and install them, rather than the BIOS. I probably could of done this without the SATA Card, using the mobo sata controller. But since I got the card I am using it and I think the card is faster then the mobo controller.


Summary: I believe that XP default is to boot from a IDE drive. You have to tell it NO you will boot from the SATA. When I did the bootcfg /rebuild, it not only rebuilds the boot.ini file but also the io.sys file telling it where the windows installation is. I'm not sure switching the IDE HDD's to the secondary controller had any impact, and I am not going to find out. It does now boot a lot faster from the SATA then it was from the IDE drive.