PC doesn't boot separate OS on separate SATA drives

Hello,

I am having the following problem and I urgently need your help:

My current desktop PC has a dual-boot config with win7 (build 7100) and ubuntu, both on a sata hd. I unplugged the win7 hd beforehand (the intention has been having xp home ready on a hd so that come Oct. 22 I can install win7 upgrade on a larger sata hd and use the original sata hd as a slave), then installed xp home on a blank & larger sata hd. PC booted into xp home.

This said, I then plugged the win7 hd back on but the PC didn't post. So I unplugged xp home disk, still no go. I had to clear CMOS before I can boot into win7. I then plugged xp home disk back in: no boot again. Spent lots of time clearing CMOS jumper and replacing CMOS battery, still no go. Where did I go wrong? By the way, my PC has Athlon AMD x2 CPU on a ECS-A780VM-M2 motherboard.

Anyway, I then took the PC to a local shop. The tech there ran a CHKDSK and removed a bad sector on the refurbished 320 Gb disk and was able to boot into XP Home. I brought the PC home and now I cannot boot into either XP Home or Win7. These OS's are on separate HDs. I begin to suspect some thing is wrong with either the power switch, the power header or the motherboard since the power pilot light does not come on. The motherboard was RMA'd before.

By the way, is it possible that the motherboard's BIOS only accept "x"number of blank HD installation of OS and anything beyond this number will render the computer non-bootable?

Any idea or suggestion would be much appreciated!

 

What did you change with the computer when you brought it home from the repair shop? or did it just stop working?

 

Hi,
Thanks for your reply. The only thing I did after getting the PC back from the shop was plugging in both SATA hard disks, then pressed the power button but there was no sound or light. By the way, XP Home was an OEM OS installed on an IDE hard disk connected to Asus P4V8X-X motherboard with VIA chipset in my first PC. In order to upgrade to Win 7, I am planning to move it to this second PC with SATA hard disks on ECS A780VM-M2 motherboard with AMD 64X2 4850E CPU. I didn't know I have to do a repair installation of XP Home on this second PC. It had installed the normal way without any problem, but now there's no POST.
Is this because the original motherboard was "tied in" to XP Home in some way?

Other than possible electrical problems with the ECS motherboard, where else can I go from here? What are the available options?

Thanks in advance!

 

Get a linux livecd and set the bios to boot from the dvdrom. If the computer boots and works with the livecd, then your hardware is probably good.

When you have 2 OS on different hard drives that weren't originally setup as a dualboot, you might end up with bootup problems. That's probably why the computer only bootups when only one hard drive is installed. The bios won't keep track of how many OS you installed on the motherboard.

 

Agree with ^^ what jonyjoe81 said. You have to prepare both the drives together at the same time to have them functionally booting together. But the secondary drive should still show up as new hardware - if all the cables, bios settings, etc, are properly configured.

Try getting back to the config you had from the repair shop. Keep it simple for testing to see if the board, or the drive, etc, is dead.