Windows cannot format system partition

[Delta Mike]

I'm trying to format an old hard drive with Win 7 after installing Win 7 on new solid state drive and get the error message above. I removed the old disk and rebooted from the windows installation disk choosing "startup repair". Repair disc completes and diagnostic reads "root cause found: the partition table does not have a valid system partition". The repair is then done and reports successful. When PC restarts I still get an error reading "No IDE Master H.D.D. Detected!" The computer will still only boot from the old disk but when it does I get the option to start the new operating system. That's all very fine but I still cannot format and use the old disk drive.
The BIOS will not let me change the drive configuration or boot order. I mean the new drive is found by the BIOS as a SATA drive but is not listed in the options for boot order. I have DELL dimension 8300 with BIOS revision A03. I cannot update it as I get message "flash access denied" even though I am logged on as administrator. I believe it can be done from DOS but I don't know how. Can anyone help?
Is there a workaround that allows me to format and use the rest of the disk leaving the system partition in place?

 

[WyomingKnott]

The message is clear but strange. If there is an available SATA boot drive, why is it complaining that there is no IDE master HDD? It should just boot from the SATA drive. But if I understand correctly, it will ONLY boot from the IDE drive.

How old is the machine? EDIT: I see a review from 2003. That's old. It does have a serial ATA header, but perhaps it can't boot from SATA. Time to replace it, 11 years later? I'll poke around and see if I see anything about booting from SATA.

EDIT 2: Those are SATA I controller ports at 1.6 Gb/s. I'm less and less inclined to do this; do you have a strong reason to do it this way? I've also seen posts that that system won't run Win7, although you seem to have it doing so.

 

[Delta Mike]

I'm an old guy and I just like to keep old things going as long as they want to. Also I get a perverse kick from making it work when it's not supposed to and the Dimension 8300 is a bit of a classic. I have it doing exactly what I want but the old disk is just messed up and needs formatting. (Like me)

It occurs to me that if I install a fresh operating system on the old disk that will format it and leave a system partition in place, allowing me to use most of the disk space as storage. As Robert Redford said near the end of The Sting, "you were right, Henry, it's not enough..........but it's close!"

Will keep you posted.

 

[Delta Mike]

OK, all fixed. Installed Windows XP on the old IDE drive and that allowed me to update the BIOS to A07 (Windows 7 would not allow this). Then booted from the W7 installation disk and ran repair. After this the system would still not boot without either the installation disk or the old IDE drive connected. However, with the IDE drive connected the system boots straight from W7 off the new SSD and the second OS (WXP) becomes invisible. The old IDE drive is now fully formatted and available as storage apart from the tiny XP system partition.
W7 is running beautifully and boots in 40 seconds from the new SSD even though it is in IDE and not AHCI mode. I put it in another computer and updated it's firmware so it now even runs the optimiser in Intel toolbox.
This upgrade was difficult only because I had no procedure to follow and I would never have succeeded without the advice gained from community forums such as this and a little invention of my own. If I were doing it again it would take minutes instead of weeks.
Hope this proves useful to someone else. DM.