PATA+SATA Woes

Hello.

I have an old pc which had w7 installed. Intel G41 chipset (ICH7).
It has got two hard disks:

Hard disk 1: PATA 165GB
Hard disk 2: SATA 500GB

When trying to install w10 to disk 2, disk layout is as follows:

HDD1 PATA: One NTFS partition (primary). Not active.
HDD2 SATA: One NTFS partition (primary). Active. Another NTFS partition (Primary)(DATA).

w10 insists on installing on PATA HD. If I select SATA hard disk I get the "BOOTMGR not found" message after first reboot. It seems booting portion is copied to HDD1 no matter which partition you specify.

I then physically unplugged the PATA HD and I was able to install w10 without issues, but as soon as I replug the PATA HD, I get a "inaccessible boot device" error message when trying to boot w10.

Any ideas?

PS - BIOS (which I updated to latest version too) has got some options for the ATA ports (Auto, disabled, Combined, not-combined, enhanced). I tried some of these but they seem to make no difference at all. Some of them even disable PATA port.

Can you post a screenshot from disk management showing all the details so we can see

Sounds like though need to rearrange the HDD boot order priority in BIOS. Also there may be a list of HDDs in BIOS that are available to boot from. Disable the PATA HDD in that list.

Good day.

Here is a screenshot from disk management.

BIOS HDD boot order priority was already set to disk 1 SATA.

After another try, I managed to fix it by manually copying boot files and folders from PATA (F drive) to SATA drive (C) and then running "Fix boot Windows errors" from within Macrium Reflect. Stupid w10 installation. I tried manually editting BCD file myself but it didn't work.

Hi there

@eLPuSHeR

Buenos días !!!

1) If the Laptop is really old it won't be able to boot in UEFI mode or GPT HDD's --even though it can read / write to GPT drives.

2) If they are already MBR then change to use PHYSICAL partitions -- not Logical Partitions --always a problem

3) Re-format all drives as Physical partitions --especially the BOOT / Windows partition and ensure the intended boot drive is MBR (you can do it by using DISKPART in admin mode -- elevated command mode).

Your Disk 1 ("C") drive is essentially the problem -- if you need 2 partitions on that drive create as 2 separate physical partitions not logical partitions.

Macrium will usually fix boot problems - but it's still better to scarp the idea of using Logical partitions. --Reformat the drive ("C" / "D") as 2 physical partitions , copy back the partition(s) again and fix boot problems via Macrium

To create partitions -- in DISKPART use the following commands

List disk
select disk xx where xx is the disk01 in your system
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
assign
exit

Now if you want to split into more partitions use a partition manager to split the new "C" partition
Doing this stuff using the Windows GUI gives you these silly simple volume things etc etc. Use DISKPART.


Cheers
jimbo

Good day Jimbo.

It's now fixed.