A7N8X v2.0 deluxe mobo / Athlon XP 2500+ / 2gb RAM
Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512mb AGP graphics
SIL 3112 revision 2 SATA raid
2 SATA drives
2 IDE HDD drives on primary
2 IDE optical drives on secondary
Boot drive has always been SATA 1, which has a ‘C’ and ‘D’ partition. It CHKDSK’s with no errors.
IDE master is ‘E’
IDE slave is ‘F’
SATA 2 is ‘G’
I’ve just done a clean install of XP Pro SP3 onto the existing ‘C’ partition.
I have SIL 3112r SATARaid controller on floppy, did F6 and completed install OK. Award Phoenix BIOS is set to boot in this order; SATA-SCSI, CD-ROM, HDD-0.
First attempt went screwy with Windows system on SATA 1 drive, but NTLDR, boot.ini, pagefile and other boot files on first IDE device, which now became ‘C’. This changed the new install on SATA ‘C’ to ‘D’. It did manage to boot but was unstable, BSOD’s on PFN_LIST_CORRUPT, and PAGE FAULT IN NON-PAGED AREA.
So I unplugged the IDE cable from mobo and installed again to SATA 1 ‘C’ partition to make sure that NTLDR etc, stayed where they should.
All seemed fine, Windows booting properly to SATA ‘C’. I installed the first few drivers, graphics, monitor, anti-virus, network, Windows/.NET updates, did a few restarts, all was working well.
I reconnected IDE cable and booted up, to get ‘NTLDR missing, press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart’.
I used a Hirens bootCD to look at my drives/partitions, and saw that ‘C’ was now pointing to the IDE drive again. I deduce that my system still wants to boot from IDE rather than SATA despite BIOS being set to boot ‘SATA,SCSI’ first. If I pull the IDE cable from mobo, it boots fine.
I think I’m missing something in BIOS or raid setup but I need help please.
Many thanks for reading long post.
