Windows 7 Sata drive and XP on IDE drive

Nitewing

Member
If I am posting in the wrong are, please feel free to delete. Otherwise I could use the assistance.

I have Windows 7 installed on a SATA board and SATA drive. I have installed XP on an IDE drive. I have run into the hardware configuration issue when I attempt to boot to XP from the EasyBCD menu. I have set the jumpers on the IDE drive to act as a slave to the SATA drive. I have performed the Vista Boot Load reinstall about half a dozen times and get the same error.

My question is, should I remove the jumper and make it a master disk also? Does EasyBCD select the drive instead of the jumper? This is the first computer I have built. If I boot through the F12 option, XP operates correctly. If I select XP on the EASYBCD menu, I get a hardware configuration error. This is all I can figure out is it may be the jumper since both drives work well through the manual drive selection.
I don't have a lot installed on either drive, but I am kind of over reloading operating systems. I don't want to remove the jumper without knowing what effect it will have.

Please don't get technical. I old, fat, ugly, and getting senile. 'preciate the help. Nitewing
 
Last edited:
There is no such concept as master/slave in SATA.
Even in IDE it's a misnomer from XP onwards.
It only makes any sense on legacy OSs which had to be installed at the front of the first HDD.
All it really means is disk0/disk1 on that IDE channel.
You will inevitably experience difficulties if you jumper an IDE HDD as slave and there is no IDE master.
Make it master (it won't affect the SATA drive).
The boot sequence is only affected by the order you set in the BIOS, not by any jumpering of drives.
 
In the BIOS, it does not let me choose which drive to start first. It only give me CD-Rom, HDD etc. When I set up the computer, until I set the jumper it would not work at all. However, you appear to be correct because when I boot, I see my IDE drive listed as 0/0 for master/slave so I don't believe the jumper has any effect as you said. My SATA drive is listed as 2.

I think I have found the problem but before I go to the trouble of re-installing XP on my Samsung SP1203N IDE drive for the umpteenth time, I would like to get some questions answered since reinstalling is getting quite tiresome.
1. I realize I probably should have installed the SATA drivers BEFORE installing XP on the IDE drive, am I correct?
a. The disk I purchased has SATA drivers but they are for Intel and I have an AMD processor. Does this make any difference?
b. Should I use the one on the disk or try to find one from Microsoft, Gigabyte, or AMD, or are they all the same?
2. Does this seem the logical issue?
It seems the boot does not recognize the IDE drive from the EasyBCD menu and I believe this is the issue that it cannot recognize an IDE drive but that does not seem logical since I can manually boot to the IDE drive.

At this point, I have removed all reference from EasyBCD from both drives and prefer to do it manually but it would be nice to use the dual boot menu.

Your quick response, was and is appreciated
 
Last edited:
EasyBCD runs on XP to enable you to use the facility to rebuild the Vista/7 boot, should you have regressed it by installing XP, but if Vista/7 is working, that's the home of the BCD and therefore the logical place from which to use EasyBCD.
 
You need to do it from Windows 7 because otherwise it might setup the configuration as such from when you have booted from the other disk.
 
Back
Top