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Old PC help anyone?


87GT
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Ok I am guessing my problem is that this BIOS isn't smart enough to boot from a CD first when my hard drive on a PCI card is hooked up.

 

This is an old Asus P4T motherboard. This Bios is probably from 2002. My IDE hard drive finally died. The only spare I have is a SATA drive. This mothboard has no SATA ports but I had a PCI card with SATA on it.

 

I only have hooked up right now on the IDE wire is a CDROM

On the PCI card 1 SATA drive.

Nothing else is hooked up.

 

If the SATA drive isn't hooked up it boots the winxp cd fine. If I hook up SATA drive and CD Rom it spins up the cd but doesn't boot. I get an error PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT. This loops forever.

 

I go into BIOS and turn the boot option to boot CDROM first and disable everything else.

 

I reboot and same problem.

 

If I hit F12 during POST I never get a boot device selection menu like on my newer computers.

 

So is my BIOS too old to boot off only sata?

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Is there software that came with the SATA card? Your gonna need to have something either;

 

A) Flash the BIOS to make it look at the SATA card then HDD to boot (doubt this is gonna be out there)

 

B) Have a small HDD or other device, CD, flash drive, etc loaded with instructions to look to the PCI card and SATA HDD to boot an OS. Its possible this type of software exists, but I have no clue. I'm just stating some info on how a computer BOOTS up.

 

You'll likely end up just having the SATA drive as a storage drive and keeping your IDE drive with an OS on it to use it.

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there are no drivers installed for the PCI card

so how could it recognize the sata drive

 

It reads the SATA in the POST before it attempts to boot anything. It tries to find any installed drives on it just like it was on the IDE chain. It verified the Make and Size on the screen.

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windows xp will not recognize sata when you go to install it, you have to slipstream the drivers or when it asks if you wish to install any other drivers before windows installs you can do that.

 

why not get a sata to ide adapter and call it a day?

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windows xp will not recognize sata when you go to install it, you have to slipstream the drivers or when it asks if you wish to install any other drivers before windows installs you can do that.

 

why not get a sata to ide adapter and call it a day?

 

Hitting up microcenter tomorrow for that. But I don't even get to the point of starting to install windows. There is always press F6 to install 3rd party SCSI drivers but it refuses to try booting CDROM with that other hard drive.

 

My other motherboard with onboard SATA boots fine from them. Even if I have IDE CDRoms hooked up.

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OK I think the only remedy now is getting an IDE hd.

 

So I bought a IDE to SATA adapter. I plug it into my first IDE channel on motherboard. Then hook my sata drive to that. It reads it fine in bios. It boots finally from my windows xp cd but it takes longer then normal. At least 30 - 40 seconds to just have it display " Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration." This stays on for 5 seconds. Then I get a black screen with nothing happening. Since I've been typing this its blank. 2 minutes so far.

 

So maybe its the win xp cd I am running.

 

I pop in a different cd winxp 9 in 1 cd. I get the menu and select the version to install. Then it repeats as I typed above.

 

So maybe its the hard drive. I format on a working computer another sata drive. I try both methods above and the same thing happens.

 

So as I final effort I boot another CD I have created that is loaded with Diagnostic dos applications and the such. I am able to load the menu. I can't load a samsung hard drive diagnostic program or Partition magic 8 because of error ""INT 13 08: Failure". I think that means it is having trouble reading a drive?

 

I am able to load a program called PC-CHECK and it checked everything as Passed.

Any other ideas anyone?

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Do you have both drives hooked up to the same ide cable ? When you had the PCI sata card in was the cd drive hooked on the primary or secondary ide port on the motherboard ?
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Do you have both drives hooked up to the same ide cable ? When you had the PCI sata card in was the cd drive hooked on the primary or secondary ide port on the motherboard ?

 

SATA is on primary IDE as master drive. CD-Rom is Secondary IDE as slave drive.

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