SATA and IDE Dont Work Together, Cannt install OS....Someone Help!

[coolguy662]

Hi... i recently assembled a new system and put in a 300 GB Seagate SATA HDD. I partioned the drive into 20 & 280 GB resp. Also i have an IDE Segate 160 GB HDD installed as storage drive. Furthermore, i went into the BIOS of the MB, and configured SATA as IDE, not Raid. Now the problem is when i install Win XP it loads setup, installs the OS and loads up the first time. After that when i restart the system, i get the following message: "Disk Not Found, Load system disc and the press enter" , or i get : "NTLDR missing, press ctrl+alt+enter to restart".

Any thoughts, recommendations, or ideas???

[glc]

Disconnect the IDE drive when you install Windows. Only create your first partition when you install Windows - leave the rest of the space unallocated and take care of it later in Windows.

[Mesaeus]

Since the bios seems to be trying to boot from the ide drive, you can also check to see if you can change the hard disk priority under Boot options. Most biosses these days allow you to select which particular hard drive is the boot drive. In my system, the sata drives are all IDE-3-4-5 etc and thus come by default later than the regular IDE-0 and IDE-1, so I always have to change the bios setup to boot from the sata drive. You might still want to disconnect the IDE drive for initial setup so Windows setup will give the SATA drive partition C:, otherwise it might be D: or E: