Removing IDE boot DISK and start using PCI SATA card

**Peach** · 01-12-2006

I have got a pc where the primary boot partition is IDE and it is connected to the main board. I have also got a PCI Sata card with 2 hard drive. I dont want to use the IDE hard drive and want to use only the SAta hard drives. So, I used the ghost software to copy the boot partition to the first Sata disk and then unplugged the IDE drive and rebooted the pc. After the welcome screen the computer seems to have hanged. So, I think that it could be a driver issue although it did start to load the operating system. After that I then tried to use the recovery tool from the XP setup CD but the CD boot failed recognizing the Sata.

**Zachary** · 01-12-2006

You should obviously try to buy a floppy or you can also try to create a slpstreamed Windows XP installation which would have the Sata card drivers integrated into it.

**Metaldigger** · 06-12-2006

You should be able to put the IDE drive back into the computer and then try to install the Sata driver and then recopy the data to the Sata. Or you can get the floppy drive instead. Actually, drivers needed to boot Windows are one of the few things left that need floppy drives. Also, did you try to boot your computer in safe mode.

**StephenQF** · 03-10-2009

If you ghost over an image from an ide to a sata you can not boot to the sata until you fix the master boot record. If windows every saw the SATA drive while you are boot up to the ide drive it will have marked it's partitions with a drive letters other than C. So you get to the welcome screen and it can not go any farther.
Disconnect the ide drive and connect the ghosted SATA drive. Boot to a dos floppy or a CD with a dos boot image on it. at the dos prompt type "fdisk /mbr". This will reinitialize the boot record. The boot record will not have the signatures of any of the drives. Windows will boot and mark the first SATA partition as the C drive. There are other ways to do it but this is what I use. I usually ghost partitions and not disks. If you ghosted a disk you probably do not need to do this. I hope this works for you.