Can't boot off new SATA drive

(The following was mistakenly first posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general.)


My present working configuration has two physical ATA drives. The master is a WD 500GB drive partitioned at C:, E:, F:, H:, and I:. The slave is a Seagate 160GB partitioned as D: and G:. (There are also two SATA optical drives.)

I added a WD 1TB SATA drive, partitioned into five. I installed XP onto the partition (L:) that will eventually become C: after I rearrange my system. (The Seagate drive will be removed after transferring its files to the WE 500GB, with new drive letters so there is no conflict with two C: partitions; in the end, I'll still have two physical drives.)

My Asus M3A7-CM mobo recognizes the SATA drive. I'm able to install XP onto it. But after telling the mobo to boot off the new drive, it refuses to do so. I get this 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."

It makes no attempt to boot of the next hard drive in sequence, the WD500 I've been using without any problems.

Windows Explorer recognizes the new drive and its partitions, so I'm not sure if Windows XP, SP3 needs special SATA drivers that I have to download and install.

The most conspicuous difference in the new installation on partition L: is that there are only five folders (RECYCLER, Program Files, System Volume Information, Documents and Settings and WINDOWS) in the partition and no files. In particular, there is no boot.ini file.

Any suggestions for getting the computer to boot off the SATA drive?

Thanks,

R1

.

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