Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm drive not booting correctly...

[justinsteger]

I bought a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm SATA drive about 5 months ago and I never have quite gotten it working correctly and am not sure what the issue is. I installed it in my PC to upgrade my storage situation from the older 150 GB IDE drive that I was using before as my primary master drive. I now have win 7 installed on both drives and can boot either installation from the boot manager. My goal was basically to flip flop over to the using the new faster and larger 1TB SATA drive as the primary master and then erase the operating system on the other drive and use it specifically as backup storage. However after unplugging the IDE drive, the operating system on the new SATA drive will not boot. I get an error that says primary hard drive not detected. Furthermore, When the IDE drive is plugged in by itself it is recognized as the master, however the sata cannot be recognized without the older IDE drive being plugged in. I'm pretty sure that the computer is recognizing both drives so why do they both need to be plugged in for the SATA drive to run properly?

Tomorrow I get the rest of the parts for my new i7 rig so I want to make sure I can boot this drive properly and reformat it for a fresh install on the new system. Anyone else have this issue? I'm sure its probably a simple fix and I probably installed windows incorrectly or something. Thank you for your time and input.

-Justin

 

[rolli59]

Does BIOS detect it? Have you changed your Boot order in BIOS to the SATA drive?

 

[justinsteger]

The Bios detects it but i can't change it to a master or include it in the boot order for some reason. Its very strange.

 

[rolli59]

It should be listed as a master since it is on its own connection! Have you tried resetting the BIOS to defaults without the IDE drive.

 

[justinsteger]

I have, it won't list the drive in the boot order even though it detects it in the list of devices in other parts of the Bios.

 

[rolli59]

That is a really strange issue since all the drives should be listed.

 

[justinsteger]

I have to completely reformat tomorrow anyway, if that doesn't solve the issue then I'll be back here with more specifics. Knowing that the experts find this unusual to at least convinces me that i'm not crazy xD. If the drive is defective in some minor way at least it should be under some sort of manufacturer warranty still. The other thing really quick is that i noticed the only difference between the 2 drives is that the older IDE has a 100 mb system partition and the SATA doesn't, its all one partition, would this have an effect on it's ability to be a bootable device?

 

[rolli59]

Make sure your SATA drive is set in ACHI (not IDE) in bios since you are reformatting anyway! The 100MB partition http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/10408-whats-100mb-partition-can-i-delete.html

 

[justinsteger]

Rolli, i think what you said was the issue, but since i still had an IDE drive i never changed it. I have just finished my new machine and delt all the issues that came with that and this is the drive i am using as my primary one it. I haven't had any issues with it sofar, especially after reformating etc... Thanks for all your info. It seems that its working great now in AHCI mode : D