Ok, this is pretty hard to describe – but here I go..
We have a good workhorse pc running windows 2000 for a graphics workstation, 2.4ghz p4 and 2GB ram.
Unfortunately the 2 IDE drives are rather small (OS on ‘F’ other drive’C’ – there is some legacy reason for this, but no one can remember why they have these Letters)
I want to migrate it gracefully to xp in order to run some more up-to-date software. Adding xp to the boot drive in its own partition would be very cramped.
So I installed an extra 160GB SATA Drive using an ALI PCI Card as the motherboard doesn’t have SATA connections – with a view to installing xp on it and, when the change-over was complete (without interrupting the daily work-flow on someone else’s pc!) to then run xp solely on the new drive.
I only discovered after installing the pci card it that it was a RAID card – something I didn’t know about, and still seem to find difficult to understand.
Nevertheless it installed OK, calling itself ‘E’ – being visible and useable from win 2000.
I then went through the complex proceedure of installing xp on it with the business of adding the drivers by way of a floppy disk(!) as requested by the installation.
This seemed to go fine too.
Booting into win 2000 you can see the xp installation files.
however, I cannot boot the pc with xp as its OS from the new drive.
I have tried endless variations on boot.ini configurations from the old boot drive and tried tinkering with the boot settings in the BIOS. Unfortunately the additional BIOS settings that installing the pci card has added to the boot sequence are incomprehensible as the card came with minimal documentation, covering installation only. I have searched for better documentation with no success.
I have also tried using a ‘boot manager’ program (GAG) from which I either get error messages or a blank screen with a DOS looking cursor when I select the operating system on the SATA drive.
It did, however, seem to see the drive with the xp installation on it.
I am about to give up, having obsessively spent hours on it, but before I do, I am hoping someone can give me a pointer to a possible solution.
Nagging question: Am I wasting my time trying to boot xp from this drive??
