Back to IDE drive from SATA drives

Question

Dimension 8400 P4 3.6 1 g of RAM 2 x 160 gb SATA 256 mb graphics audigy sound BT Voyager wireless networking card     My motherboard and power supply are now fixed.  The system would still not boot to Windows.   To save time and effort I have installed an IDE drive in place of the DVD so that I can back up the entire contents of both hard drives prior to formatting.   It boots up from the IDE but fails to pick up the SATA drives as drives D and E   Do I need to alter the jumpers on the SATA drives? Do something in the BIOS ?   Any help would be appreciated   Paula

ejn63 · Answer

On the 8300, and possibly the 8400 as well, if you install EIDE drive(s), the SATA drive must be the boot drive.

paula18 · Answer

OK, the SATA drive will not boot to Windows.    I need to make the IDE drive master and the two SATA's slaves/secondary drives.   Is this possible ? by changing jumpers and/or BIOS settings   thanks

ejn63 · Answer

No. As above, if you have both drives in the system (EIDE and SATA), SATA must be boot.

ejn63 · Answer

Were these independent drives, or were they part of a RAID array, and if RAID, RAID0 or 1?

paula18 · Answer

ok, so how do I get the data off the drives, the HDD disgnostic shows the disks are ok so the data is intact.   help pleeeese

paula18 · Answer

thanks for the reply.   the C drive (drive 0) has Windows XP on it and is in theory bootable.  The windows XP screen comes up then it blue screens and goes into a loop.   the D drive has been used to back up to   Shall I try and re-install windows - run a repair - any ideas please as I need the data from this machine   thanks

paula18 · Answer

These are two separate hard drives C and D

VoiS2 · Answer

Assuming that these IDE were not in a RAID previously, and assuming that you do not now want to do RAID with your SATA drives ...

After making one of the SATAs your boot drive as mentioned above and installing the OS onto it, and leaving one SATA aside for awhile, you can hook up the older IDE as a slave on your optical drive's IDE port.

Again the above assumes you aren't fiddling with RAID at all.

VoiS2 · Answer

It's hard to tell what you are referring to with regard to C: and D: drives, but the following from me assumes that you have two SATA drives, and at least one older IDE from which you need to pull data.

I will call the two SATA drives 'SATA-a' and 'SATA-b' -- simply to distinguish between the two.

(1) Put the SATA-a drive into bay 1, and put the IDE into bay 2. Hook them up to power and their respective data ports. It is likely that the IDE will be on the same IDE cable and port as your optical drive.

(2) Put SATA-b aside in a safe place for a while.

(3) Install Windows XP. It will install the OS on the SATA drive, because the SATA drive must quite simply be the boot drive on the 8400.

(4) After the install of XP, you can accomplish the transfer of data from the IDE to SATA-a.

(5) Remove the IDE, and put SATA-b in its place.

(6) Now you can accomplish a data transfer from SATA-a to SATA-b, if that is your desire.

paula18 · Answer

Ok well after trying and failing I restarted the machine put it into safe mode and it booted.

Then I restarted the machine and it booted normally without any errors.

It is now working as if nothing had ever happened and all my data is intact without needing the ide hard drive

Storage, Drives & Media

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