PC geek help: booting from SATA pci card

[Rik]

My poor computer's been playing up of late, and I'm almost definite it's the motherboards SATA driver crapping itself.
So a cheap PCI SATA card was bought. Of course nothing's ever simple for me and just plugging in the SATA drive on which Windows XP is installed isn't going to get me anywhere.
What I need to know is, after installing and running XP off the mobo's SATA controller, is there any way I can change things so I can just swap over to the PCI controller? I really really really don't want to have to go through and install windows again, that's a chore I've done enough times this year

If you can help me, that'd be great.
Thanks in advance.

 

[-Elliot-]

Get a MAC

If you look in your bios there might be a setting.

 

[Rik]

Woohoo, get a mac and make life 10x as difficult (I predominately use freeware and know as a fact much of the software I need isn't available for white toy computers).

Had a look in the bios, selecting to boot from SCSI -which I assume is what the computer sees the card as being - doesn't help.

 

[chris_mtb]

i got a mac laptop
its good but i am building a better pc
im pretty sure you will need to reinstal xp

 

[jamit]

Sounds like and interesting problem;

Does the BIOS see the HDD (and report the correct HDD size) once you have it plugged into the PCI Card?

 

[t]

you'll probably need to install a driver when it prompts you to "Press F3 (i think) to install third party raid or scussi drivers"

XP doesn't really support SATA it was kind of patched in later.

 

[Mo]

you will almost defintely need a hard drive that is connected through the onboard connectors to load up the software for the sata card and then it will be able to boot up.

at least a hard drive on ide

unless you have newer mobos where they support pci sata boot up

 

[baldychoko]

Hey,
I have had the very same issue before first you need to make sure that bios can seen the HDD secondly it depends what service pack of windows xp your trying to install. service pack 2 does support booting from sata. It was a bit of a nightmare for me i just ended up putting the IDE drive back in with a fresh install of XP on that and just that for apps and windows files and using the sata drive for extra storage.
I swear im not a geek......
Nick