grn Posted May 14, 2006 Share Posted May 14, 2006 Hi,I've just bought a SATA drive for my system which already has 2 IDE drives on it. The original C drive contained Windows 98SE and I now want to add XP as a dual boot system. I planned to install both systems on the new SATA drive (shows as drive E) but find that installation of either systems writes all the boot info to the old C drive.I want to keep the two IDE drives on the system but also want the option of replacing them at some later stage (eg. probably adding a second SATA drive). Since there is boot info on the C drive this means that I am stuck with this drive unless I can find a way to get both Win98SE and XP to install completely on the SATA drive so that this is bootable. My motherboard supports booting from this disk, so this isn't the problem, and I know I can get a bootable system on the SATA drive (I have a second system with dual boot XP and Linux but this only has a SATA drive).Disconnecting the C and D drives then installing seemed to be a solution but the drive letters all change when they are reconnected and the system again fails to boot. Am I missing something simple or is it just not possible to have a mixed IDE/SATA system with the SATA drive as the bootable disk?Hoping somebody can help and apologies if this is the wrong forum.George Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grn Posted May 15, 2006 Author Share Posted May 15, 2006 OK, problem solved. It seems pulling the IDE cables on both drives works. The SATA drive becomes the C drive and stays like that even after the IDE drives are re-cabled. When I added it the IDE drives were cabled and the SATA drive became the E drive. I assumed that this was the way that the drives were numbered.Thanks anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robertpri Posted July 23, 2006 Share Posted July 23, 2006 grn,It sounds like we have the identical situation. Just found this thread. I have two ATA drives and two SATA drives which are now "copies" of the ATA drives. Like you, I want to only use the new SATAs. Compounding my issue is win98 on drive one, and XP on drive two. Win98 must load first to get boot.ini menu to work. This has worked perfectly for me with the two ATA drives, and I'm struggling to get them out of the box.It appears that I can remove the ribbons, boot to the SATAs, and then later reattach the ribbons for using the ATA as backups.I believe that is what you said. Right? [i've been chasing this for a week!]many thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted July 24, 2006 Share Posted July 24, 2006 It is NOT recommended to attach/detach cables on a live system.Please read this post of mine about drive lettering and all other ones linked to :http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=70405jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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