XP refuses to install on SATA drive

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Luca Rescigno

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 2, 2003
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I recently upgraded my PC and I now have a motherboard with onboard SATA (Epox 8KDA3J) and a 200 GB Seagate SATA drive. My goal was to have a single hard drive for my whole system instead of using the aging 40 GB and 80 GB hard drives I have for now. So for the time being, I have all three installed.

I've been having plenty of problems, though. First of all, I kept getting a message saying that it could not find the file "hal.dll" when it tried to start. I searched for the problem and found that it could happen when trying to boot with more than one OS installed. So I disconnected by old ATA drives and connected only the SATA drive to install Windows.

This is the procedure I have now followed every time for the past three or four tries:

Boot from the WinXP CD
Format the SATA drive
Install Windows Setup
Restart

At this point, a message will come up saying that it failed to find an operating system. I've tried partitioning the drive into a smaller piece so I could use FAT32, but that didn't help. I have messed with boot orders and so on. I made a driver floppy disk using the CD that came with my motherboard, and loaded it, but it didn't help. I can see the drive in the text-based Windows setup, and even in the Windows GUI if I have it hooked up while I boot from my primary IDE hard drive. So I don't think it's a hardware problem, though I guess it might be.

The only thing I haven't tried is doing a slow format rather than a quick format. I already did a slow format (and waited a damn long time for it too) earlier in the process, and it didn't help. Other than that, I'm completely stuck.
 
In the bios make sure you have the 1st boot device set to CD and the 2nd set to SATA or other...

It may just be looking for ATA devices or the cdrom...

When the install tell you to restart take the CD out if it auto runs for some reason...that may help...

??

I'm tired...just tryin to help :]
 
No, it's definitely not booting from the CD. I have the CD set in front of the hard drive for the boot order, but all that does is display the "press any key to boot from CD" option when I start up. If you let it go it boots from the hard drive after a few seconds.

I asked this question at another forum and someone said that he had to use some kind of hard drive configuration tool made by Seagate to get it to work. I tried the bootable one and it didn't do anything, but I'm going to try using their regular graphical one for Windows will get it up and running.
 
Luca Rescigno said:
No, it's definitely not booting from the CD. I have the CD set in front of the hard drive for the boot order
Click to expand...

When you say 'hard drive' what do you mean?

I set my to scsi on my shuttle...only because I have it boot from my SATA Controller card...

Do you have SCSI or SATA as options?
 
Also make sure your Sata drive has an MBR. Unplug all other disks, make sure the bios is set to boot off of it, and boot into recovery console.
Type FixMBR
Type Fix BOOT
exit
 
Ok i have a SATA Drive with my OS installed on it. What you have to do is get SATA Drivers then when you start up with XP cd there is a place to press f3 i think it is to added extra drivers now put the drives on a Floppy and then it will promt you to select the driver. Select it and now you can install on the SATA driver now if you have an IDE drive in there in the BIOS change the boot devices not to include IDE then it will have to boot of SATA by default. Also some Mobos have a jumper to set the SATA to active if its built on to the board.
 
Frontline: Actually it's F6 to load third-party storage drivers. And in my original post I already said I tried it.

I made a driver floppy disk using the CD that came with my motherboard, and loaded it, but it didn't help.
Click to expand...

I am quite sure that SATA is active because the drive does show up. I can use it when booting from one of my other hard drives, and I can see it and format it when booting off the XP CD.

Ranma_Sao: What is MBR? When should I type those things? It sounds like you might be onto something but I'm not very good with this so could you give me some more in-depth instructions for this?

dolphumous: I mean that the hard drive is the third item in the boot device chain. Then, there is a BIOS feature that lets you choose the hard drive priority. All three of my hard drives show up - I have my old boot drive (IBM 40 GB), my old storage drive (WD 80 GB), and my brand new drive (Seagate 200 GB). The Seagate is currently set to be the top-priority hard drive to boot from, but I can always choose which one to boot from by using the BIOS's boot menu (press esc during post). I am definitely booting from the drive that I want to. In fact, during my attempts to install Windows, ONLY the Seagate drive was plugged in so it would have been impossible for it to try to boot from anything else. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm 99% sure it's not the boot order. The problem has to do with it not wanting to boot into Windows properly from the Seagate SATA drive, no matter what I do.

I even ran a Seagate hard drive utility that copied my old boot drive to my new SATA drive. I watched the progress bar show that it had transferred every last bit of data from the old drive to the new one, and then tried booting from the Seagate. Guess what? "Error locating OS." Same damn problem as before. It seems to work for everything EXCEPT as a boot drive. But I don't want to be forced into using an IDE drive just to boot from and keeping the SATA only as storage. I guess I could do that as a temporary measure so I can sell my 80 GB and clean up the inside of my case a bit, but I'm still really frustrated by my new hard drive's inability to boot into Windows.

HighwayAssassins: No, I'm not overclocking.
 
Boot off of CD
Press F6 and load drivers
continue navigating until you hit a menu where you can hit R for recovery console
When the recovery console starts up, type fixmbr
fixboot
exit
and see if that fixes your problem.
 
Earlier in the thread (though not in my original post), I said:

during my attempts to install Windows, ONLY the Seagate drive was plugged in so it would have been impossible for it to try to boot from anything else.
Click to expand...

I should have mentioned this in the first place. But yes I have tried that.

Thanks for the suggestion Ranma. I'm going to try that as soon as I can. Hopefully it does the trick - I'm guessing that reformatting the hard drive doesn't fix the boot section? If that's true I can see why I would be having problems.
 
Well, I think that settles it. Even after going into the repair command line and using fixmbr and fixboot to rebuild the boot sector, I get the exact same error. Seagate tech support just got back to me to say that it probably has a physically damaged boot sector. I can't think of any other explanation at this point so I might have to RMA it.

Is there anything else I can possibly do? I'd at least like to run some kind of a check before I just send it back, to see if the boot sector is actually damaged. I can't think of anything else to do, though.

EDIT: Ah, finally fixed it! Turns out I had to set up my single drive as if it were a RAID. Then it worked dandy. I found the info at an MSI support forum that someone here linked to a little while back.
 
read my post 2 up, physically disconnect all IDE hds (so the SATA is the only drive connected), and try...
 
fryguy, read my response to that. I already did that, in fact I mentioned it earlier in the thread and then quoted for emphasis last night.

But as I said, it doesn't really matter. I figured out what the problem was, but I had to do a search here, which turned up a thread that had a link to the same problem at a different forum. It's fixed now. Woohoo!
 
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