Hi, I'm not a computer whiz by any means, so I don't know what exactly is causing this problem, but here's the lowdown to the best of my ability.:
I just built a new computer for the first time and am running Vista 32-bit on it with a 500GB SATA hard drive. It's replacing a computer that was running XP Home with a 40Gig IDE hard drive. I want to import all my data from the old hard drive, and so I set the jumper to slave position and plugged in in to the IDE. My BIOS does show it as and IDE slave (with IDE master empty and my other hd on SATA1), and the master works fine by itself, but when I tried to run it, it got a boot error that it couldn't find windows/system32/config. I unhooked the intended slave drive and it ran smoothly. Is XP trying to launch or something? What do I need to do to get it to just run as a data source?
If you have your SATA drive as the first boot device, I don't think it should matter that you jumper the IDE drive as a slave-it's not a slave to another IDE device, assuming it is alone on the IDE cable. Try jumpering it as something else, master, CS, etc., and see what happens.
Ok, I found an issue that was in the BIOS where the old hd superseded the new one when it was hooked up, but now when I run with Vista booting correctly, it comes up with an error screen that Windows did not start properly, what would you like to do, and then a list of options, including safe mode, etc. When I clicked start Windows Normally, it just put itself into a kind of limbo for a while, and so I shut it off. Still, I just unplug the old hd and everything loads perfectly. Does anyone have a point of reference for this issue? I mean, I know that it's a fairly common procedure to get data off of an old hd when you make a new computer.
This really sounds like a Windows issue, based on the computer booting successfully until it gets into Windows. It appears that Windows can't sort out the boot drive when presented with both a Sata and an IDE drive. I'd put the IDE drive in a usb enclosure, but I've got those parts lying about. I'd be tempted to put in a live Linux disk and see if it could copy across, since the current Ubuntu disk can now write to ntfs file format as well as read it. But all this nonsense should not be necessary, and so far you've done all the right things.
Why not give your last attempt another try, but choose Safe Mode.
in safe mode, it asks about drivers for the new hardware. I can't find anything like that online, though. A friend said that he had to do almost the same thing and it had something to do with drivers. I've got the specs and everything on the old hd. In any case, would there be a safe way to boot from the old hd as a master and install vista onto it while preserving the data, then transferring them onto the SATA as a slave drive?
When it wants drivers, it's still trying to boot from the old hard drive. Other than the ideas I mentioned earlier I can't think of anything except trashing the mbr or boot sector of the old drive.
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