I have always booted my windows xp home from my 120GB IDE HDD. The drive is starting to go, and I want to boot from my 250GB SATA HDD. I have installed xp on the SATA HDD with now problems, but when I try to boot from it, it won't let me. I have gone through my BIOS, and changed the boot sequence to the SATA HDD, but it says DCHP.... and just hangs there. My Motherboard is a DFI Infinity 975X, if that helps.
How did you transfer the operating system from one hard drive to the other? Did you clone it.
Does the sata drive ever bootup to the windows logon screen? Is the original drive still connected to the computer?
The error you get DHCP that is a error that deals with network/internet settings. I've never seen that error when I have done IDE to IDE or IDE to SATA hard drive upgrades.
With windows xp, it's usually boot.ini or drive letter problems that will prevent the "clone" drive from booting.
What I did was install windows xp on the SATA drive, then formated the IDE drive. When I tried to reboot, that is what happened. I Had to install windows xp back on the IDE drive in order to be able to boot into the SATA xp. But now I have to windows xp boot options. All I want is to be able to remove the old IDE drive, and run xp from the SATA drive.
If the IDE drive can boot fine by itself, one option is for you to do an image backup of the drive and restore that image on your sata drive. The neceesary motherboard drivers will be already on the IDE and will be transfered to the SATA, this procedure has always work for me. An it would be quicker than any other repairs you might try to do.
You can use the free macrium reflect to do image backup and restore. It has a very good boot cd. You can backup xp from within windows, but to restore you will need the macrium bootcd(created from the macrium program).
From the description you state that the sata can boot but only if IDE is installed. If that is the case you might have to edit the boot.ini file to try to get the sata to boot. But that is more complicated. It might also require you to move some files from the IDE to the SATA (ntldr etc) that's why it might be easier to just to do a restoration.
If possible it would be a good idea to make a bartpe (with the driveimage xml plugin and also the macrium reflect plugin)
bartpe (all you need to make the bartpe is your windows xp installation cd (takes 10 minutes to make)
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
The bartpe will allow you to edit the boot.ini edit registry etc, with the macrium plugin it will support more hardware, and driveimage plugin can reset a hard drive ID.
If the image backup and restore doesn't work, you can use the bartpe to make repairs. Usually a simple reset of the hard drive ID will get the restored drive to boot.
search for & download the trial version of acronis to clone the idehd onto the sata hd. also check hd manufacturer for their utility disk that can clone drives.
have you tried disconnecting the ide to see if sata drive will boot. make certain in the bios in the drive priority list if there that the sata is 1st as long as windows is installed on it.
