Hi,
I am adding a new SATA drive to my system which previously only had an IDE drive. The simple (doh) plan was to reinstall windows on the SATA drive and then to copy my work files etc across from my IDE drive which will then just act as extra space.
I unplugged the IDE drive temporarily to install the new XP. The installer couldn’t see the SATA drive – so I dug out the motherboard (NF7) cd to get the SATA-RAID driver and copied them to a disk. Got XP installer to see the SATA, made partitions and installed XP onto the first partition. XP complained about the driver not being windows tested, but I ignored that.
Now XP is installed and running off the SATA – so I reconnected the IDE drive. I found that if there is *any* mention of the IDE drive in the booting order (even if it is below the SATA) or if the windows CD is in the bios hangs. But OK, I removed the IDE-0 reference in the boot order just leaving “Serial-ATA” and removed the XP cd and it now boots up off the SATA.
Now I can see my C: and the other (unformatted) partitions of the SATA plus a SINGLE partition corresponding to the IDE drive. The IDE drive has 3 partitions – but I am just seeing a single unformatted drive.
I obviously don’t want to format this drive, so what hoop do I now need to jump though to get this new XP on the SATA to recognise my 3 IDE partitions with my lovely data on it. :rolleyes:
Thanks for any help,
Vesalius
Unsolved 
