Hi
I have a problem booting my Dell Optiplex GX270. A few months ago I bought a SATA drive, connected it, formatted it – everything was hunky dory. I also have two IDE drives, one of which is my boot drive containing WinXP Pro SP2.
Then my friend needed help with his SATA machine, so I leant him my SATA drive which he connected, formatted and he installed WindowsXP Pro on it. After he got his computer (a RAID machine), back in good working order I again connected my SATA drive (containing his WinXP) to my machine.
After enabling it in the BIOS (A06), my computer tried to boot from the SATA drive. This resulted in a blue screen (because the OS was looking for a RAID 1 configuration which obviously was not present).
The only way I can get my machine to boot now is to press F12 (the boot menu) and select ‘Primary Master Drive’ as the drive to boot from. If I select ‘Drive C’ the computer attempts to boot from the SATA drive, even though SATA 2 is listed as a seperate device. I have deleted everything from the SATA drive and have also reformatted it. I have tried changing the connection from SATA1 to SATA2 on the motherboard.
I have also tried changing the boot sequence in the BIOS but the only options available are ‘BIOS enabled devices’ and ‘USB devices’ – there is no distinction between IDE and SATA. If I allow my machine to boot without interuption now, a message is displayed saying that NTDLR is missing.
When I look at the SATA drive in Disk Management there is just one partition shown.
Does anyone know how I may force the computer to boot from the IDE (the primary master drive).