Can anyone help me out with this one please

I have a shuttle XPC system. I originally had a 120Gb IDE drive and that was it. However sometime ago i got a 300Gb External SATA drive.

Now i have had these two dirves running just fine for sometime now and was using the SATA drive as my main drive but my old IDE drive also had windows on it so when i booted up my machine i got a boot menu asking which windows i wanted.

I have finally got around to clearing everything off the old IDE drive and have now formatted it but i could only do this using my windows disk for some reason. Then after the format windows installed itself too.

Anyway now when my pc boots i get no boot menu and the damn thing just goes straight into the latest install i have just put in the IDE drive:mad:

I am not happy i had everything set up nicely on my SATA drive and it is still all there but i dont seem to be able to boot to it now.

Any ideas?????

Can you go into setup and name the drive (external) that you want it to look for the boot up info first.....that way it should boot from the external drive.

Can you go into setup and name the drive (external) that you want it to look for the boot up info first.....that way it should boot from the external drive.

I have tried loads of different things in the bios, none of them have worked.

there is no option to boot from either SATA or an external drive.

I shouldn't really matter that iit is external as with external SATA it is just a cable from the SATA header on the motherboard to a plate on the back of the pc that then goes to the drive. It is essentially just like having an internal SATA drive.

hi ,

presume its xp? on both drives.

first stop for me would be to look at yer bios and just have the sata drive on the boot sequence. to make sure you can boot up on that on its own.

also , if xp, what does your boot.ini file say?

do you want to Only boot from the sata now? , if so make sure the ide is a slave drive and turned off in the boot sequence.

let me know how you get on

mulv

hi ' date='

presume its xp? on both drives.

first stop for me would be to look at yer bios and just have the sata drive on the boot sequence. to make sure you can boot up on that on its own.

also , if xp, what does your boot.ini file say?

do you want to Only boot from the sata now? , if so make sure the ide is a slave drive and turned off in the boot sequence.

let me know how you get on

mulv[/quote']

There is nowhere specific to actually select the SATA drive in the bios though.

I have even disconnected the IDE drive and i still cant boot to the SATA one.

Yes i do only want to boot to the SATA one iwas sort of having them both running while i transferred some stuff from the IDE one.

It is as if the multi boot option has been lost when i have formatted the IDE drive.

My head hurts now:confused:

I know that when windows is seting itself up it asks if you want to install a third party SATA driver but i have never done this as i thought windows sp2 had this incorporated in it.:confused:

Anyway it was working ok and it isn't now so i don't get it.

Funny thing is 10 years ago i loved messing around with pc's, but now i just want the thing to work:mad:

I know that when windows is seting itself up it asks if you want to install a third party SATA driver but i have never done this as i thought windows sp2 had this incorporated in it.:confused:

ah , k ...if you have a sis or via chipset mobo ? , and you havnt done the old F6 add 3rd party trick at install then you may have to go to your mobo manufacturer and get the driver. i have had to do this before.

Which Shuttle model is it?

Steve

How to Set Up Dual Boot After You Install Windows

View products that this article applies to.

Article ID : 153762

Last Review : June 3, 2003

Revision : 2.0

This article was previously published under Q153762

SUMMARY

This article describes how to set up Windows to dual boot with MS-DOS on a computer that was originally set up as a Windows-only computer. To dual boot, the computer partition must be a file allocation table (FAT) partition and not a Windows NT file system (NTFS) partition.

MORE INFORMATION

1. Start the computer from an MS-DOS floppy disk that contains the Sys.com file. Sys the boot drive to MS-DOS by typing the following command at a command prompt:

a:\>sys c:

After you type this command, you receive a system transferred message when the procedure is finished.

NOTE: This command disables the Windows boot loader so that the computer boots MS-DOS when booting from the computer's hard disk. You must repair the Windows boot loader after you use the following steps.

2. Reboot the computer from the computer's hard disk to a command prompt and install MS-DOS on the computer if it is not already installed.

3. After you completely install MS-DOS and reboot, restart your computer by using the Windows Setup disks. During Setup, select R to repair Windows.

NOTE: You need to repair only the Windows boot sector. Do not choose to inspect the registry files, the Windows system files, or the Windows boot environment during this procedure.

4. After you repair the Windows boot sector, you need to manually edit the Boot.ini file to include an option to boot to MS-DOS. The Boot.ini file is a read-only, hidden, system file that is located in the root folder of the boot drive. Add the following line to the Boot.ini file under the operating systems section:

c:\="Microsoft DOS".

The next time that you reboot the computer, you have an option to choose MS-DOS on the Windows Start menu.

You can use the procedure in this article to enable dual booting between Windows NT and Windows 95. To dual boot Windows 95, boot the computer to MS-DOS and install Windows 95. A Windows 95 installation is Windows NT-aware and does not overwrite NT boot loader information when you use this procedure.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Above from Microsoft web site hope it helps

If you don't want to boot from the IDE at all, you just need to format it again.

Use the WinXP CD again and go through the setup until you get to the install location bit. Select the option to delete the partition on the IDE drive, then exit setup.

Then the PC SHOULD boot from the SATA instead, which will then allow you to use WinXP's Disk Management to re-partition and format the IDE drive without putting Windows on it.

Sorted.

You might need to edit boot.ini which will tell NTLDR to allow a boot from the external disk.

load the XP that works and locate the boot.ini file.

Edit this file (you may need to remove the system and read only attributes. The file is in the root of c: c:\

Now what happens next depends on if the external drive if fat formatted or ntfs.

You need to add another line to boot.ini

For example, this is my current boot.ini (office pc)

[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=OptIn /fastdetect

you need to add another line to the above, for ntfs it would be.

multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=OptIn /fastdetect

If you don't want to boot from the IDE at all' date=' you just need to format it again.

Use the WinXP CD again and go through the setup until you get to the install location bit. Select the option to delete the partition on the IDE drive, then exit setup.

Then the PC SHOULD boot from the SATA instead, which will then allow you to use WinXP's Disk Management to re-partition and format the IDE drive without putting Windows on it.

Sorted.[/quote']

Wouldn't this be the same as diconnecting my ide drive??

I did this and still no luck.

I know what people say about the third party SATA drivers but i am sure if you have got Service pack 2 you dont need to do this. I never did it previously and have been booting from the SATA drive:confused:

The shuttle i have is a SN854G.

Had a look for Boot.ini and cannot find it:mad:

Did a search in windows and no sign of it.

Ok i have found it now and edited it will go and see what happens

Tried editing the boot.ini file

things where looking good becasue i got a menu up with two Windows installations to choose.

However when i selected the one for my SATA drive i got the following message

"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

Please check the windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your reference manuals for additional information"

Still confued, and annoyed:confused:

multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=OptIn /fastdetect

That line will need tweaking as windows boot loader is looking in the wrong place to find it.

If you are feeling risky you could always use a linux distro live CD and install Grub to do the booting for you.