Imaged XP from IDE to SATA II - Boot Problem

Hello

I have just imaged XP from my IDE drive to my new SATA II drive. I also have a second IDE 300Gb drive set to slave.

When I disconnect the bootable IDE and connect the SATA II drive my PC keeps restarting at bootup.

How can I fix this, do I need to reload XP from scratch or should the image of XP work??

Thanks
Paul

 

i dont think you can restore from one ide controler to another without universal restore.

Home/non UR versions can only restore to identical systems.

 

Is your BIOS set to boot from the proper SATA channel?

You may not have the SATA driver loaded in your IDE image. You could probably put your original IDE drive back into the system with the SATA drive and let Windows detect the SATA drive and load whatever is necessary. Make the image and try again.

 

your BIOS have an option to modify SATA mode?
If your BIOS have this option , you can change the mode , you must select compatibility mode and you dont´t need drivers to Start Windows.
Probabily you must need to clone Again from IDE to SATA.
If windows starts, install SATA driver and change again SATA mode on BIOS

 

In my BIOS I changed the boot priorty to the SATA drive as the first drive to boot from. Then I made sure it was set to boot from the HDD first in the boot order. I've had a look around and theres nothing else in the BIOS that I see needs changing any further - although this is the first time I have owned a SATA and still learning.

When I connect the SATA drive whilst running Windows XP from the IDE drive I see the SATA drive appears in My Computer as M: drive. Although this is the first time the SATA has been plugged directly into the motherboard whilst running XP. It was plugged into a USB to SATA converter before when it showed up in My Computer.

Will I need to re-image again or will it make no difference?

Paul.

 

I've successfully imaged a Packard Bell HDD to a new replacement drive with no problems using Acronis. All new Packard Bells have a recovery tool hidden on the drive and Acronis coppied that also but I have not yet tested that but it boots up no problem.

My computer does not have a factory recovery because I built it.

Thanks
Paul.

 

Hello Paul,

When your SATA II drive was connected via the USB to SATA converter, I very much doubt that Windows will have installed the correct SATA II device drivers. Now that the drive is connected directly to the motherboard and correctly detected by Windows, you need to create a new image of your complete IDE system drive. With luck, when you then restore the new image to your SATA drive, Windows will find the necessary native drivers.

Regards

 

Thanks Menocamen

I'm in the process of creating the image, I had imaged my IDE 80Gb previously as mentioned but when I loaded the image onto the new SATA II 160Gb it split the drive into two just let than 75Gb each.

I then purchased Acronis Disc Director 10 so I could merge the partitions but I had all kinds of problems where for some reason it wouldn't merge. So using XP I managed to sort it using Disc Management however, my computer has become unstable since I connected the SATA drive and will randomly reboot without warning at anytime.

I'm starting to regret buying SATA drives now! I have another one to install once I get this problem sorted!

Any known issues why a SATA II drive can make the PC unstable?

Regards
Paul.

 

Does your motherboard support SATA II or SATA 1? SATA II drives are supposed to backoff and support the slower so-called SATA 1 transfer rate but on some systems it isn't reliable. There is usually a place for a jumper on the back of the drive to force SATA1.

In the context of this message SATA1 means 1.5Gbps transfer rate and SATAII means 3.0Gps transfer rate.

 

Hi again Paul,

Does your motherboard's SATA chipset actually support SATA II disk drives? If not, then you may find a jumper on the SATA II drive which forces it to operate as a standard SATA drive. I know my Samsung SP2504C has such a jumper that I needed to connect.

Regards

 

Hi there seekforever. Snap!!

 

How can I find out if my Motherboard supports SATA II?

My motherboard is a Gigabyte K8NS Ultra 939

When ever this SATA drive is connected directly to the motherboard is causes my PC to reboot randomly without warning. I have managed to create another image of the IDE drive and copied it to the SATA and for a very short time managed to boot from the SATA into XP but then it rebooted again.

My motherboard settings relating to SATA are as follows...

Serial ATA Function = set to RAID not BASE
Onboard Serial ATA = enabled
IDE Functiuons...
...RAID enabled
...SATA Primary Master RAID = Enabled

How do I make my Western Digital SATA I?

I have jumper pins on my Western Digital SATA II 160Gb HDD (WD1600JS) but it has no physical jumper, no problem but how do I force it to become SATA I as there's no instructions - typical!

This is all I can tell you at the moment

Regards
Paul.

PS; many thanks for all your responses, I'be very grateful!!!

 

OK it may be early days but I'm now writing this whilst booted into XP on my SATA II drive force back to SATA I via jumper setting. Seems stable so far. So if this is true then there's issues with my motherboard via SATA II.

I only bought this motherboard in mid 2005 - I would have expected it to support SATA II by now!!

Can you tell me if there is any mileage in trying to resolve this via BIOS update and/or updated chipset drivers etc or should I stop wasting time and enjoy until I buy another motherboard?

PS; the only reason I chose to upgrade to SATA II was to improve speed, will I gain speed if I leave the drive set to SATA I compared to IDE? I know IDE = 100Mbps and SATA I 150Mbps (i think) but will it be noticeable?

Kind regards
Paul.

 

The difference is in the interface - serial vs IDE; the bottleneck is reading the data from the disk platter. In the real world where you are looking at sustained speeds more than a burst there is very little difference especially between SATA1 and 2. Note that using SATA2 to mean 3gbps transfer rates in not really correct but it is what everybody does.

 

Is the speed difference between IDE ATA100 vs SATA I noticeable?

Paul.

 

I have heard numbers like 15% on benchmark tests is that noticeable in what you are doing in real-life computing? Probably not much.

Lots of drives are just the same old drive but with a SATA rather than PATA interface. They can transfer the data to the bus faster but then they have to wait until the physical disk catches up reading more data from the platters.

Then there is the effects of disk fragentation, PCI bus contention with other devices etc - in other words the only meaningful benchmark is what you are doing with your PC. You can get better performance by going to a 10K RPM drive or RAID.

SATA is faster, it is the new standard so you might as well go with it.

 

Thanks for your replies, However I have another problem.

First of all I've been using my SATA drive forced to SATA I for over an hour without any problems so the problem for me was a compatibility issue with running SATA II. The new problem I'm having is that the hard drive icons in "My Computer" are missing. Not missing as in they're not there, but hard drive icons are now being displayed as broken link icons.

I now have 3x HDD connected.

C: = SATA I - this icon shows the broken link icon
D: = IDE - this icon shows the broken link icon
K: = USB (SATA I)- this icon is fine

When I change the drive letter D: to M: the broken link icon changes back to the hard drive icon. Change it back to D: and I get the broken link icon again?

I want to fix this problem - HELP!

Regards
Paul.

 

Hi Paul

I'm afraid it doesn't. I've checked the <specifications> for your motherboard. It uses a Sil3512 SATA Controller chip, which is definitely only SATA I (150MB/Sec transfer rate).

You appear to have sorted it but just to make sure, I attach a diagram of the WD1600JS jumper setting.

Regards

 

Thanks Menorcamen

Looks like you visited the same site as I did for that picture!

All sorted now apart from some corruption in Windows which has rendered my drive icons to broken links - you know when you have a file and windows doesn't recognise it? Can this be fixed?

I suppose I could re image again? but if there is a quick fix that would be better.

Regards
Paul.

 

I've not come across that problem before Paul so I'm afraid I can't help you there. Here's hoping one of the other guys can come up with the answer.

Regards

 

Do the drives work and the icon is just mixed up?

Try the drives one at a time in the PC and see what happens.

Did you redo the restore to your SATA drive after you put the jumper on? It could be corrupted.

 

Drive work fine but the icons seem to have been corrupted. I will re-image tomorrow and let you know.



Many thanks
Paul.

 

OK I got to the bottom of the problem. It turns out that a program I was trying out called HDD Life which monitors your hard drives. For some reason during my fiddling and imaging the program stopped loading at startup causing the hard drive icons not to load. It apparently replaced the windows hard drive icons with its own which looked identical.

Many thanks to all who offered their advise, it can be a lonely experience fault find especially when your an I.T. technician like myself - who do you turn to??



Paul.

 

THe Samsung I have does have a driver - but that forces the mode change. On my system it works fine without the forcing - auto detects

 

Hi starfish_001,

Good to know. However, I wasn't prepared to risk finding out whether my Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro would play nicely with my new SATA II drive, so decided to jumper it from the get go.

Regards