A friend of mine has just upgraded his computer, and plans to mirror his old IDE drive to a new SATA drive. The new motherboard was installed and the old IDE drive and the disk drives were installed without any hassle. The new SATA drive took some time to arrive from the dealer, we installed it, booted the computer and Windows refuses to recognise it. The BIOs system on the other hand does, and gives all the correct information on the drive. All the approprate drivers for the MoBo are installed, and Computer Mangement, in the Admin Tools, doesn't see the drive either. I don't have the specs off hand, but when I do I'll upload them in case anybody needs them. We were also wondering if, we booted the computer into a Linux OS, such as MINT Elyssa or a form of Ubuntu, would we be able to mirror the drives in that way? Thanks in advance!
If the drive's not seen in the disk management section of computer management then I'm not sure what to suggest. Maybe if you have the windows install disk you could try booting from that as if to install windows. Go through the partition and formatting stages and then see if that brings it to life. Just make sure when you reboot that you're booting from the old disk and not the new and ideally do the formatting etc with the old one disconnected just to make sure that no boot loader stuff is added to the old. As for imaging in linux - I don't really know if there's a auto tool for it but Ubuntu will read ntfs, so you could manually partition and format (no need if you did that on the windows disk) and then copy files across. If you booted from linux then there shouldn't be any unaccessable files. Alternatively you can create a Windows boot utility CD by following instructions here - based on XP http://www.ubcd4win.com/. This option will take a while to do but it's a very useful CD to have in your collection for future use.
Well, the drives aren't recognized so no. But we got another SATA drive that has an OS already on, and the same problem occured. So we're now pretty sure that its a MoBo driver problem. The Mother is a: MSI K9VGM-V VIA K8M890 Chipset We installed the SATA control drivers, but to no avail.
Just a note, disk controllers are one of the things Windows cannot tolerate being changed. If the boot drive was on IDE, then it must stay on IDE. If you can't get your SATA controller into a legacy IDE mode, then you will run into problems. Maybe someone else knows how to deal with the the issue of changing dis controllers though. I have a system I'd like to switch over to AHCI from regular SATA without doing a reinstall
Still nothing yeah, we tried to boot it from another SATA disk, that already had an OS on it and nothing happened. We got it to load as far as the Windows XP loading screen, but then it hung and restarted itself. We've finaly decided that it might be a bad MoBo
