Can't boot into Win XP with SATA HD installed

Hello there,

What you might want to try doing is get another SATA drive make sure that it has an OS on it load off that one and then when you are in windows you should see your non working HD in there.

This link tells you that it work for them and it was also a Dell

http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-11187-0.html?forumID=86&threadID=182970&start=0

Hope this helps

You will have huge amounts of trouble booting on a different PC as the BIOS etc are all different.
Try adding it as a second HDD in a new PC and boot to the original HDD.
When you get into windows, it will recognise the new HDD and you will be able to access it through explorer.

Clarification - I am trying to add it as a second hard drive.  In the second PC I boot to an IDE hard drive.  The SATA card is installed there in Windows XP and I have done this successfully before with other SATA hard drives.  With this one, I get the blue screen.  When I disconnect it, I can boot into Win XP fine.  Thank you.

You have 2 bootable hard disks connected.  Ensure boot priority in BIOS is set so that it boots from IDE first.  You may actually be trying to boot from SATA drive.  It's not unusual for an add-in controller to be first boot device.

Hi marathonman330,

Maybe you can ensure that your Bios settings says boot off the IDE drive. And try again with a new SATA cable.

Found that for many PCs when the SATA cable is bent or twisted it gets faulty after some time and causes errors during bootup.

Hope this helps.

The IDE drive is the first boot device.  The SATA drive is seen in the BIOS.  I tried a different cabe, same result.  Thank you.

The SATA drive will be identified in controller BIOS, not PC BIOS.  I believe it is being set as boot drive by SATA controller and overriding BIOS boot configuration.  See page 22 of Adaptec controller manual for how to disable boot in controller BIOS.  Link for manual below.

http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/support/suppedindexprod.jsp?sess=no&language=English+US&cat=%2FProduct%2FASH-1205SA

Well this one seems tough. Whats happening here is that as soon as the IDe disk starts booting up winxp starts to search for other hard disks and on finding the SATA disk attempts to read the partition table/boot record. My guerss is thats where the problemtic bad sectors of your disk lie and WinXp not being able to read the sectors of the har disk crashes with the blue screen. I have seen this happen quite a number of times even with IDE disks. What you can do is however to get an external USB enclosure for the SATA disk and plug it in after ur IDE disk has booted into the OS.

http://www.usbgear.com/USB-SATA.html
http://www.addonics.com/products/enclosures/ae5idecsu2f.asp

You can try these links. I have found this method to be most reliable when it comes to a problem similar to yours. Its just that the bad sector of the disk is in an area where windows needs to read data. If you had an IDE hard disk with a similar problem i would have suggested Spinrite to get some useability back but no such luck with SATA disks.

Dan

What I've seen is that XP (or 2K) will lock up when trying to mount a problem disk after new hardware identification.  I've never seen a BSOD reboot occur except when there is a problem with boot disk.  First time for everything, just haven't seen it while testing hard disks.  Use add-in controllers to connect suspect drives and exclude boot from that controller.

As soon as WInXP tries to mount the problem volume it locks up cause the system areas for the 2nd disk are damamged. This causes both WinXP and 2K to lock up and in case of 98 causes a long delay after which it boots into the OS. Maybe in the NT kernel its important for the volume to be mounted.

The USB method is the safest since on the fly it might take time to load up the volume but since the Boot process is not depending on the mounting of the drive BSOD wont happen. At worst windows might give an error about reading the Disk or someething. Thats maybe one reason why data recovery is best done under DOS where direct Disk access is possible.

Dan

Solutions have been provided which shud work. If the asker still has problems, we'll be glad to help.

Dan

I was never able to boot into Windows in the second PC with the failing drive installed as a second hard drive.  I installed a new SATA HD in the Dell 4700, reinstalled the OS and GetDataBack and was able to recover data from the original drive by installing it in there as a second hard drive. (no boot issues)  Thank you all for your help.