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hobiecatter

7 Posts

3388

May 18th, 2007 13:00

Problem booting SATA drives with XP Pro/Vista Please read!

I have an XPS 410.  Came with Vista Premium.  I have a second hard drive that I am trying to dual boot with XP Pro. 
 
I installed XP on the new Hard drive while the Vista drive was unplugged.  I didin't have a floppy drive, and since I have SATA drives, it wouldn't recognize the drives during install, so I switched the bios from Raid On to Raid Autodetect/ATA and it recognized them and I installed XP.

Next I hooked up the Vista drive, and to my own stupidity, I booted to see what would happen.  Vista tries to load, but goes BSOD before getting too far. 
 
As it stands now, the XP disk will only work while the bios is set to Raid Autodetect/ATA and the Vista drive will only boot if it is set to Raid On.  This is while only one drive is attached, not both.  If it is in the other mode, they both show the same BSOD -  STOP: 0x0000007B
 
I assume I cannot start the XP drive with Raid On because the SATA driver was not loaded during setup.  Is this true?  I installed the proper chipset drivers from Dell while booted into XP thinking that this would allow it to boot with Raid On setting, but this does not help any matters with the BSOD during boot with Raid On.
 
Also it is still wierd that I cannot get Vista to boot now with Raid Autodetect/ATA and only with Raid On.  I have to swtich the cables AND change the setting in the bios everytime I go from XP to Vista or vice versa.  Any help?  I've tried all I can think of.  I know there are different boot sectors for each OS, but I first need to get the drives to be able to boot with the same bios settings before I can do anything else.

thanks!
 

jackshack

6.4K Posts

May 18th, 2007 15:00

SATA drives are ATA compatible, but they have a special interface designed to be driven by an AHCI compliant driver.  This driver allows queing of the commands for more efficient operation.  When Vista was installed by Dell they certainly used the AHCI drivers which need the bios to be set to RAID ON.  When you switched to RAID Autodetect/ATA you put the bios in ATA compatible mode which works fine for Win XP's native ATA drivers, but won't work with the AHCI driver that Vista is set to use.  In order to use ATA with both you will need to reinstall Vista so that the ATA drivers will be loaded.  Or you need to reinstall Win XP with the AHCI drivers slipstreamed into the installation CD (or install a floppy drive so you can perform the load using F6).
 
 

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