[Help] - Boot Installed on wrong drive

[RationalRabbit]

I have been working on this for days. Successfully installed once and ended up with corrupted files on the Win98 partition, so want to get it right this time. (Don't remember how I did the "successful" install - after several days of various problems - most of which are now solved - I am a little brain-dead.)

What I am looking for is a way to create an XP boot on the SATA drive. I assume this means changing the MBR. As far as I am aware (explained below) this cannot be done from the XP install disk.

System:

MotherB: Asus A7V600 with VIA Chipset

Drives: 0 120gb SATA; 1 15GB IDE; 2 10GB IDE

Current Status:

Win98 and WinXP both operational but no dual boot. Win98 was installed first. Both systems were a clean install. Both systems installed on FAT32 in seperate partitions on the SATA drive. Computer startup simply goes into Win98, as there is no XP boot sector on the proper drive.

Situation:

Placed the proper driver for install with the SATA drive. XP recognized this drive and installed properly except for one small<g> problem: While recognizing the XP partition on the SATA drive, it did not recognize it as drive 0, or just otherwise did not recognize it at all. Because of this, the boot loader was installed on drive 1, instead.

Sidenote: Booting from a CD or Floppy never recognizes SATA as drive 0, but instead as drive 2. Some boot disks will not recognize it at all. The latter is the situation when using XP's Repair function after booting from the install CD, even with the driver loaded.

I assume that I can just copy the NTLR, Boot.ini and NTDetect.com files from drive 1, and I have good information for creating a Bootsect.dos file on the SATA. My problem is in creating an XP boot sector.

I need to be able to either:

1. Be able to do this from DOS (probably not an option)

or

2. Find a utility that will boot in XP, recognize the SATA drive, and allow me to create that boot sector.

or

3. Hear any other suggestion that would work.

Any help would certainly be appreciated.

Title Edited - Please follow new posting rules from now on.

--Zxian

Edited December 19, 2005 by Zxian

[LLXX]

If the BIOS supports SATA devices then they should just appear as standard disks to the software. You shouldn't need a driver specifically for a SATA device.

BIOS upgrade maybe?

[RationalRabbit]

Unfortunately, you do.

As far as the XP install goes, this is the reason for the status message at the beginning of the install to press F6 to install a driver. (It may say "SCSI driver" but its the same purpose as far as the install goes.)

XP was developed when SATA's were first coming into popular existance, so there are no built in drivers.

I believe the main problem is with the VIA chipset, but I have installed the latest drivers. Perhaps a BIOS upgrade may do the trick, but I would like to avoid that if possible.

MSDOS at least recognizes the drives, but they are in the wrong order, so my "C" drive becomes drive F, and D becomes C. XP install CD will not recognize the drive at all unless you hand it the driver when it asks for it.

Doing this let me install the OS on the SATA, but it either otherwise did not recognize it, or (more likely) simply had the drives in a different order.