Can't boot to IDE

Your motherboard supports only sata drives as boot drives. You cannot replace it with a ide drive. There are inexpensive sata drives available. Like this one at Tiger Direct.

The system will boot from an EIDE drive provided there is no SATA drive in the system.  However, if you're transferring a drive from another system, you will need to format it and load a fresh copy of Windows onto the drive before it will boot - you cannot move a drive with an installed copy of Windows from another system and expect that it will boot.

Mary G.,

"Your motherboard supports only sata drives as boot drives. You cannot replace it with a ide drive. There are inexpensive sata drives available. Like this one at Tiger Direct".

The system will boot an IDE drive as long as there's no SATA drive in the system.  That said, if the image was made from a SATA drive that was set up in RAID ON (AHCI) mode, you will not be able to boot from a drive imaged using that image.  You MAY be able to image the system, boot from an XP CD, and do a fixboot and fixmbr to get the system to boot from the EIDE drive.

Thanks EJN,

I'll try that in the morning when I get to work.

IKE

OK I tried that and it didn't work. I can't find anything that shows the drive was setup as RAID, there is only 1 HDD in the system and its ATA. The SORRY bios doesn't give any specifics about drive fomatting or partitioning, so I can't tell whether its ACHI or not. Any other IDeas. BTW> I am trying to ghost the drive again from a 3rd machine, pulled the working drive out and using USB adpater and a cloning program to copy the drive to another 40GB drive. Hopefully this will work this time. IKE

Your motherboard supports only sata drives as boot drives. You cannot replace it with a ide drive. There are inexpensive sata drives available. Like this one at Tiger Direct.

Is this specifically stated somewhere on the Dell site or user documentation for the Dell systems? Mine is a Dell PowerEdge 800. I don't have the docs with me.

Lone SATA HD on system seems to have gone bad and won't boot. So attempted to rebuild system with spare IDE drive (currently set as IDE 0 slave, as CD is likely master on IDE 0). I could put it as IDE 1 master or put CD on IDE 1 but didn't want to mess with IDE cabling.

I've tried disconnecting SATA connection to SATA drive as well. What I see is that I see no option to boot to IDE HD in  the boot sequence. Also the boot sequence options are vague. It only has IDE CD, Embedded MBA (for PXE I think?), and C:\ drive (when the SATA drive partition was not deleted and reformatted). The C:\ drive part does not mention whether it is SATA or IDE. Dell should have at least specified what drive type it is. Because from Windows Server 2003 install, I can see IDE drive and make IDE drive C: partition and install to it but then I can't complete the install because BIOS won't boot to the IDE to finish the install.

It is sad that you need to boot to SATA only, if that is true. Especially if you have spare IDE drives lying around. So I guess IDE drives are only for data storage on these Dell systems?

Hi, daluu:

All of the documentation for your system can be found on the Dell support site. Just click the "Support" button above to get there.