DonPedrone

hello, I am still using a machine a decade old (super socket-7, gigabyte ga5ax, k6-3-550). it features an ultra-ata-66 onboard ide-interface and I am running two 120gig ide-samsung drives. currently I am using two operating systems: win98 (c:\win98) and xp (d:\windows). everything is working fine. then some time ago I started testing performance of various "new" sata-harddisks by using different brands of pci-addon-adapters (via, promise, silicon). as it turned out the via-adapter (which is not bootable) turns in the best performance (85 to 90mb/s the first 75% of a wd6400aaks disk, then declining linearly to 55mb/s at 100% capacity of the disk. this is a pretty fantastic speed-improvement compared to the samsung disks I currently use on my onboard adapter (55mb/s at the beginning of the disks, 25mb/s at 100%). my idea now is to install a new instance of windows xp on the new sata-disk which will be connected to a pci-addon-adapter, but still "boot the machine" from C:\ on my ide-harddisk connected to the onboard adapter. this would give me 3 operating systems to choose from the menu. according to the information I have gathered so far installing an os (nt, 2k, xp) on a disk connected to a pci-addon-card adapter should be possible (even if non-bootable, ie without own bios or int13 interrupt serviceing), see http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...f.mspx?mfr=true and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/102873/en-us unfortunately up to now it does not work. when I install xp from the cd, I feed it with the appropriate driver (F6) for the adapter-card. it then recognizes properly the sata-disk on the add-on card and allows me to choose it for installation. there is no problem in creating a partition there, format it and copy the necessary files over there. then the setup process tells me (as usual) that it needs to reboot the machine to continue. it reboots the machine, reads the mbr from the good old C:\-drive, finds the boot-loader etc and shows me the menue of the os to choose from (well, actually at this point it does not because the timeout is set to 1 sec and I have no chance to interfere here). it has set the new installation as the default to start in order to continue and finalize the installation-process. but it immediately comes up with an error message (white on black screen, text mode) that says something like "windows could not start because of disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot-disk. check boot partition and disk hardware." here is the boot.ini it looks like after it has been altered to accommodate for the new os-installation. [boot loader] timeout=1 default=signature(49adff13)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] signature(49adff13)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect C:\="Microsoft Windows" according to microsoft's docmentation (links above) this is exactly as it should be. because a not-bootable adapter is in use we find the "signature" variable used to identify the disk to start the os from. I have checked, the signature-id equals the id found in the sata-disk's mbr. quote: "The Signature syntax is used only if one of the following conditions exists: • The partition on which you installed Windows 2000 is larger than 7.8 gigabytes (GB) in size, or the ending cylinder number is higher than 1024 for that partition, and the system BIOS or boot controller BIOS does not support Extended INT13. • The drive on which you installed Windows 2000 is connected to a SCSI controller whose BIOS is disabled, so INT13 BIOS calls cannot be used during the startup process. The Signature value is extracted from the MBR." also, according to the docs I find the file ntbootdd.sys, which quote: "is a copy of the SCSI device driver and resides on the system partition. Ntbootdd.sys is used when using the SCSI or Signature syntax in the file Boot.ini." I have checked, the ntbootdd.sys file is in fact a renamed copy of the sata-adapter card's driver file. what is the problem? to overcome any problems which might arise because of the lack of any adapter-bios I repeated the whole procedure but this time I used the promise adapter, which has its own bios that shows up when I switch on the pc and also shows me the sata-disk connected to it. but this does not do the job - I end up with exactly the same error message at the same point during the setup. any help welcome!!!

thanks a lot! I will try your suggestions and will report back.

ponch, thanks for your hint - I think I understand your idea!! problem now is that I have given the notebook back to the person it belongs to so I can not test your hypothesis. at the moment the system is set up as to show the welcome screen (icons for each user). is there any simple way to change the login screen I can instruct my friend over the phone to go for - so easy he is able to understand (he really knows nothing about computers ...)? also could you explain how it is possible to have another keyboard-layout at login-screen different to what is setup normally? how can that happen without knowingly managing to achieve? this bizarre situation happened over the night, from shutdown to the next restart. or in other words: could you explain what to do if one wants keyboard layout A at login screen but layout B when logged in? EDIT: to answer your question: I don't remember exactly what the message was. it certainly did not pop up in a new window (no message window at all), there appeared just a very small notification area (no window) below the line where to enter the password and it tells not to forget about a possible problem with the shift-key (lock) or at least something similar.

hello, I am using xp pro and from one day to another all user accounts with password set up are no longer able to log in. the only way to log in as a specific user is to log in with system's adminstrator account (which luckily had no pw set) and remove the pw for the user. if one then sets up a new pw for the user the situation is the same as before: the password is rejected. bizarrrr!!!! I have set to allow pws to never become obsolete and also have set to allow 999 tries to log in before the systems locks the account for 1 minute. has anybody an idea what is going on here and how I can solve this puzzle?