SATA drive (boot) problem

[User Name missing]

I have a Dell 4600, win XP pro, 40gb IDE master HD and a 120gb IDE slave. I installed last night a 1tb SATA drive. Once I finally got it working, it worked fine. Started transferring pics over and went to bed. well it musta crashed half way thru cause when I woke up, the den was basking in a blue death glow. Yup, blue screen O death. Said something along the lines of "page fault error in non page area". Rebooted......nothing. Looks like its trying to boot from the SATA drive even though the boot sequence is C: first (40gb is the C:). Now I can bypass this 2 ways, manually tell it to boot from the "primary drive" (telling it to boot from the C: doesnt work) or go into the bios and disable SATA. How can I remedy this cause Im outta HD space and desparately need to get the sata drive to work. I've tried setting the bios boot sequence to boot first from the C:, just wont do it.

[mjonesjr]

It is hard on a motherboard to mix SATA and IDE drives. I would recommend backing up your information, remove the IDE drives, and re-installing XP on the SATA drive.

1TB is more than you will ever use.

[fleck]

'Now I can bypass this 2 ways, manually tell it to boot from the "primary drive" (telling it to boot from the C: doesnt work) or go into the bios and disable SATA'

Isn't this the answer right here?

And yes, you should do a clean install of your main system on the SATA drive (be sure to create partitions though, maybe 200GB for the system and the rest for data). It's so much faster and reliable, you'll like it. Then wipe the IDE drives and keep them as backups/alternative storage units.

But I say 'no' to problems running both IDE and SATA on any system though, unless you're implying it's a problem on just certain systems, and Dells aren't known to have the best boards/BIOS so it could be a problem with the board. If you want to go that far, you can contact Dell for a solution, or maybe look for updated drivers/BIOS on their site first.

[off_road_junkie21]

Yes, I second that. Mixing sata and ide is NOT hard on motherboards. I also second the idea of using the sata as the primary, and to partitioning it as stated above. You could also try to using one of your workarounds to get into windows and format the sata drive (or do it from dos/windows disk). Reboot and see if that fixed the problem. Maybe fixmbr (google it).

[pocket-rocket]

IDE vs SATA is like an NA 2.3 vs a 2.3t with 25 psi of boost - there is just no comparison. I won't ever go back to IDE, so I agree with making the SATA drive your primary drive. You could always use the IDE as a secondary drive for something that isn't data rate intensive like pictures and mp3's or something. Backups, like mentioned above, would be another good idea as well.