I’m doing an upgrade involving a Core2 Duo on a new MSI 945P Neo3 mobo that features 4 SATA ports & just one EIDE port. New 320GB Hitachi HD connected on SATA 1, which is replacing as the boot drive the legacy 80GB Maxtor EIDE HD, both drives under WinXP sp2. Because we have 2 DVD-RW drives and the IDE HD (and only 1 IDE port) I used a SATA-to-EIDE adapter cable to connect the old IDE HD to SATA port 2, and then used the EIDE port for the 2 optical drives. I should mention that the old IDE drive is partitioned into dual-boot XP sp2, both boots of which formerly booted properly.
BIOS detects both HDs (SATA 1 as Primary Master, and IDE drive in SATA 2 as Secondary IDE Master); it detects both DVD drives as Third Master and Slave. SATA 1 is of course jumperless, and IDE/SATA 2 is jumpered for Master.
When I boot into SATA 1, MyComputer senses all the HD volumes, and I’m able to access the contents normally.
But what is desired is run Files & Settings Transfer Wizard to bring all the settings from IDE/SATA 2 to SATA 1; and in order to do that, I need to be able to boot into SATA 2 as well.
Although I can configure BIOS to boot first from SATA 2, when I attempt to boot to the older install of XP, it gets only as far as the boot selection screen (to select between the dual boots) and when either boot is selected, the machine restarts. I cannot get the SATA2 HD to finish loading XP in either partition.
Q1: Can one boot from Secondary IDE Master?
Q2: Should I move the SATA2 cable to one of the other SATA ports (e.g., SATA3)?
Q3: Should I try putting one DVD drive on the SATA-to-IDE adapter cable instead, and reconnecting the IDE HD directly to the 1 EIDE port on the MB? (I’d have to sacrifice 1 DVD-RW drive.)
Q4: Is the problem something else?
Thanks for your help.