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Okay folks... Posted by Justin VanAbrahams [Email]  (#32) [Profile/Gallery]
(more from Justin VanAbrahams) on Fri, 13 Jan 2006 13:56:42
In Reply to: Windows XP Question, Bob M, Thu, 12 Jan 2006 18:33:19 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
I haven't read all the posts, but there is some misinformation here:
1. Windows NT4 and later doesn't care what drive it's installed on. It doesn't even understand drive letters - they're there for your convenience. Windows internally refers to drive letters by controller/drive/partition - in an old computer, the first IDE drive will be called something like "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)" by Windows - not "C:".
2. Windows must have its boot files (NTLDR et al) on the first physical drive - the one that's installed to INT80 by the BIOS. This drive can be SCSI, IDE, SATA, whatever. Windows doesn't care, doesn't know. It's the BIOS's job to assign interrupts to drives, not the OS. If you want a certain drive to be INT80 (first physical drive) then you must go into the BIOS, and tell it that. Most BIOSs have a facility for assigning "controller priority" - please be aware this is NOT the same as "boot order." Look in your BIOS for this. If your SATA controller is not on the motherboard, but instead an add-in card, your BIOS will most likely refer to it either as 'EXT' or 'SCSI' - it can't usually tell the difference. If SATA is onboard, you should have no problem making it the first controller.
3. Windows keeps track of drive letters by writing a signature to each drive, and updating the registry with that information. Under normal circumstances Windows will try to match the registry entry with the drive signature, so that unplugging/replugging drives results in them always having the same letter. This doesn't always happen, especially when two signatures are competing for the same letter, in which case I honestly don't know how Windows chooses, but it's not always the same.
So, all that said: If you are trying to replace an IDE drive with a SATA drive, you must be sure the SATA drivers are installed in the system before GHOSTing the drive. Once that's done, and the new drive has been imaged, you'll need to boot the system up with only that drive installed so Windows has a chance to update signatures/registry entries and set everything straight. Be SURE the new SATA drive is the only drive in the system, or you risk running into problems.
Once that's done, you should be able to plug in your old IDE drive and boot up normally ASSUMING CONTROLLER PRIORITY IS ASSIGNABLE IN YOUR BIOS. If it isn't, this may not work, and you'll end up booting off the old drive anyway.
I'd *suggest* two things if this fails:
1. Leave the old drive out of the system for a couple weeks to make sure the new drive is stable and in good shape.
2. After a couple weeks, take the new drive PHYSICALLY out of the system, boot off a Ghost or MSDOS disk, and nuke the partitions on the old drive. Put the system back together and see what happens. Windows should go ahead and boot off the SATA drive. You'll then be able to make new partitions on the old drive, and everything should be hunky dory. You MAY find, if your controller priority is not assignable, that Windows now fails to boot. If this is the case, you can use that MSDOS disk to boot to DOS and edit your BOOT.INI file on the SATA drive. You will need to change the "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)" to reflect the proper position of the drive. This will likely involve only changing the multi(0) part, likely to multi(1) but possibly 2 or 3.
Hope this makes sense - I've done this more times than I care to count, I'm doing it right this minute - a customer's old Dell Dimension is adding a 250g SATA drive in place of the old 20g IDE drive.
On a side note, GHOST works very well, but the Windows component of the software is ASS in my opinion. I strongly endorse making that boot floppy or CD, then uninstalling it. Yes, you can use Windows to generate a Ghost script and make it all nice and automated, but the DOS version of Ghost is simple and easy to use, and you only need that boot floppy. You may check on bootdisk.com - they may have a premade Ghost floppy image for download there.
posted by 216.57....
, Sat, 14 Jan 2006 12:22:17, Fri, 13 Jan 2006 13:56:42 <-- Viewing This Message, Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:07:23, Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:39:50, Fri, 13 Jan 2006 11:50:26
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