I have an old Pentium 4 system (Abit IS7 series motherboard) running XP. The machine is set up as an HTPC. It was set up and running well for years with 1 SATA drive as a boot drive, another SATA drive to store TV recordings, and an IDE drive to store more recordings.
Last week the original boot drive (a Seagate SATA drive) failed after 8 years of almost continuous uptime. The BIOS would no longer recognize it, and I did not have an OS installed on either of the other two drives, so the machine could not boot. I had a disused Western Digital 80Gb IDE drive hanging around, so I used my Windows install CD to reformat it and install XP on it.
My two IDE hard drives (the "new" Western Digital 80Gb with XP on it and a Western Digital 250Gb with no OS) are now on one channel. I set the jumpers according to the diagrams on the drives, so that the boot drive is master and the data drive is slave.
I have two SATA connectors on the motherboard, so the remaining healthy SATA data drive (a Samsung 500Gb) is plugged into SATA1. (In the BIOS settings it shows up as IDE Channel 3 master.) I have set the boot order in the BIOS so that the IDE drive with XP on it has top priority.
All three drives are recognized by the BIOS, however the system will only boot if I disconnect the healthy Samsung SATA data drive. I am sure the Samsung 500Gb SATA drive is functional, because if I hot plug the drive AFTER the system is booted, I can go into the control panels and mount the drive, and see all the files and folders on it in Windows Explorer.
Any suggestions on what is going on and how to fix it? Many thanks.
Best Answer
If you can set it in you BIOS and it boots without the SATA drives, probably for IDE / PATA hard drive has
No Jumperpresent (which means it's on Slave Mode) or it's set to aJumperwhich is on Master without Slave present / Master with non ATA compatible Slave.Change the IDE drive jumper to
SingleorMaster. Attaching a screenshot below:Update:
Some links I promised with people having similar problems, but most say they can't boot through the SATA when IDE is connected. Your problem is exactly the opposite.
I simply think the BIOS has some issues, and sadly Abit has stopped making motherboards and has also stopped giving updates. You might need to find a decent workaround!