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6956
November 28th, 2008 12:00
Missing Operating System when IDE AND S-ATA HDD in System Optiplex GX270 at same time.
Hello,
my Dell Optiplex GX 270 System includes an IDE HDD Drive with the working Operating System.
I had bought a new internal S-ATA 500 GB Drive and could install it without problems in the first time.
The Operating System is on the IDE Drive, the S-ATA-Drive shall be used for storage.
After some problems with a Windows XP Update i could not start the system. The message is: "Missing Operating System"
Now i have reinstalled the windows system on the IDE Drive and it works fine - the only problem is: It only works when i run the PC with the IDE drive only. When using the S-ATA Drive i get the "Missing Operating System"-Message again.
I didn't find any possibility to exclude the S-ATA Drive from booting in the BIOS - and no other setting that seems suitable.
Has anyone an idea how to solve the problem?
Thanks for any suggestions
Peter Baer
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husky0894
1.6K Posts
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November 28th, 2008 12:00
In the 8400, if you install both EIDE and SATA drives, the SATA drive must be the boot device.
Peter Baer
2 Posts
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November 30th, 2008 14:00
Hello Husky0894,
thanks for your quick answer.
What Du you mean by "in the 8400"?
And what i do not understand: Why did it work in the first place for a very long time - just before the crash, caused by a windows update mistake.
- therefore, if there are other opinions, i would be glad to read this.
best regards
Peter Baer
Thereal-dbk4297
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3.4K Posts
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November 30th, 2008 14:00
Hello,
I suggest that you run Dell diagnostics to see what it finds.
Hanspuppa
799 Posts
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November 30th, 2008 14:00
Hello Peter Baer, Since you mentioned you installed the OS on the SATA drive at some point, the drive must have the boot.ini file on it as well as on the IDE drive.
If you want to boot to the IDE drive as your OS system drive and use the SATA drive as a backup drive, you will need to edit the boot.ini file on the IDE drive and remove any mention of the SATA drive.
Before you attempt to edit the boot.ini file, you need to copy it to another location on the hard drive, and not just to C:\ where the original boot.ini is located.
The boot.ini file is just a text file that can be edited in Wordpad that tells the OS which hard drive to boot to.
If you are not sure how to edit the boot.ini file, do a Google search and it will all be there.
Hope this helps.