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"Press any key" doesn't happen with SATA


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I have a system with CD drive and SATA drive only. BIOS recognizes the SATA drive as Third Master.

Unattended CD does not prompt me with "Press any key to boot from CD".

It just goes into the install process .. which recognizes the drive.

Then when the system reboots to install .. the CD is still in and bootfix.bin doesn't recognize the hard-drive.

Looks like bootfix.bin doesn't probe for a Third Master IDE ...

Has anyone seen this??

Thx!

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Do you have a hidden partition that is used to restore your system. One of my PCs had one and it caused problems with the XP setup disc. It would boot on the CD, would delete the C: partition (which was an extended partition in this case), but would not write any files to it.

The fix was to delete the hidden partition.

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Not hidden partitions. Just a CD drive and a Serial ATA drive (that's recognized in BIOS as 'Third Primary Master'.

Seems that when the CD boots --- it doesn't recognize any formatted partition .. so it doesn't issue the "Press any key .." msg. Then it will automatically start installing the CD onto the harddrive (C: ).

But when it reboots .. it does not recognize any drive ... then starts installing again.

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all u have to do is

go to bios

make sure that your first boot is your CD. that is it problem solved.

when booting from CD... i.e. U.A. CD/DVD it should always boot first.

if after changing your bios to boot of CD/DVD drive first, and it still does

not have any effect.

It means your U.A. CD/DVD doesn't not have the correct boot image.

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I think he's getting at the fact that the boot sector seems to be unable to tell if an SATA controller has a bootable drive on it.

The bootsector will skip the "Press any key to continue..." prompt if it does not detect a bootable drive, and I get the feeling that this was what he was describing.

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Exactly ... Wraith hit the nail on the head!!!

I do have BIOS set to boot CD first .... but it doesn't recognize that I have a bootable SATA hard drive.

The exact CD will show "Press any key" when I have an IDE drive.

Just looking to see if anyone else has noticed this.

Dell now sells only platforms with SATA drives.

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I'm confused ... you're saying that it reformats your partition, then it reboots. After it goes through BIOS, it boots to the CD again and starts teh reformat again?

It would make sense for you to perhaps go into your BIOS settings and change it to NOT boot from the CD first. Rather, have it boot from your HDD. Then it should load the Windows XP Installer GUI. From there, it should be able to read the CD just fine. I used the wrong boot image on my old unattended disc and wound up having to do that.

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First, you should make sure your SATA controller has the highest priority in the boot sequence and also that your drive is positionned as the FIRST Master.

Then, since your installation when fine, make sure the SATA drive is the first in the boot order, you no longer need the CD drive to be first. Beside I always recommend that you use a hotkey to boot from the CD to launch the installation (like F11 for MSI motherboard, F8 for ASUS, F12 for Fujitsu Notebook, etc...)

This way, you don't ever need to modify the BIOS setting to boot from the CD

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I'm having the same issues ("Press any key..." doesn't show) and I was wondering about the reason for this.

I'm setting up an unattended WinXP Pro installation and burn it to a DVD-RW. System is a single HDD connected to 2nd master and a DVD-RW connected to 2nd slave. For testing purposes I removed the HDD and connected a SATA HDD to 3rd master (BIOS says so, it's SATA #1) instead. Boot order is CD-ROM then HDD. In both cases the "press any key..." is always skipped; DVD boots into text mode setup. When using a copy of the original WinXP CD it works ("press any key..." shows if the HDD is formatted and bootable, both PATA and SATA).

Is the boot sector provided on various web pages (e.g. unattended.msfn.org) really the latest available? How can I extract the boot sector from my CD? Or is the usage of a DVD the reason for this behaviour?

Any comments would be appreciated.

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