Crash when booting from SATA drive

[rjhorton]

Hi,

I have a clean Win 7 Professional 64 installation on an IDE drive that is working fine and can access another SATA drive that I have installed on the system.

If I clone the IDE disk (Acronis) onto the SATA drive (then use repair to fix the boot details and change the boot order in the bios) then the machine will begin to boot from the SATA drive (showing the starting windows logo) but will restart after about 10 seconds. It's exactly the same each time and in safe mode shows that it crashes after disk.sys.

I originally installed onto the IDE drive because I had the exact same issue when trying to install directly onto the SATA drive and figured it might be something to do with the drivers.

I've tried a number of other suggestions from other posts:
1) disabling all non-essential devices
2) using only one stick of RAM (and trying different sticks)
3) using other SATA drives
4) trying a different video card
5) trying another SATA controller
6) using safe defaults on mb bios
7) updated bios to latest version
8) updated mb and graphics drivers to latest versions
9) using ide modefor the sata disk

I've had install problems before but this one really has me stumped. What I really don't get is why it works on the IDE drive.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Rob

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Weird.

Do I have this right:

Direct Win 7 install to SATA disc has failed for more than 1 SATA disc.

Direct Win 7 install to IDE disc succeeds the only time you tried it.

Restoring image of the successful IDE Win 7 install to at least one SATA disc fails to complete boot.

Hmmmmmmm.

Do you think that the successful IDE install itself indicates SATA issues?? I'd guess you can image IDE to IDE successfully?

Are these all clean installs?

 

[rjhorton]

Yes to the first three
I've also tried imaging to another sata drive with the same result so it can't be the drive.
Also tried using one of the imaged SATA drives on a different SATA controller (i.e. not the one integrated on the mb) and it does the same thing.

I don't have another spare IDE drive to try an IDE to IDE image but it certainly looks like it would work.

Yes, they're all clean installs rather than upgrades. The discs had stuff on them before but I deleted all partitions during the install process.

Glad it's not just me scratching my head!

 

[zzz2496]

You can't just change the boot device just like that, IDE installation will use IDE disk on an IDE bus as it's boot device, when you clone a working Windows 7 running on an IDE device and trying to boot it on a SATA, Windows will restart, since it doesn't find the correct boot device. If you're in Windows XP/2000, it will blue screen and show you the error message: Inaccessible boot device. This doesn't change much in Windows 7/Vista, just using different boot loader.

zzz2496

 

[rjhorton]

You can't just change the boot device just like that, IDE installation will use IDE disk on an IDE bus as it's boot device, when you clone a working Windows 7 running on an IDE device and trying to boot it on a SATA, Windows will restart, since it doesn't find the correct boot device. If you're in Windows XP/2000, it will blue screen and show you the error message: Inaccessible boot device. This doesn't change much in Windows 7/Vista, just using different boot loader.

zzz2496

I used the install repair process after the cloning process which says something about fixing that. Is there something else I need to do? I vaguely remember something about a file that gives the controller and disk id for each installation and assumed that was what the repair process was fixing.

 

[zzz2496]

There's the registry that records which harddrive/partition your system is on, then there's the storage drivers that windows load at startup, wrong driver = restart/BSOD. I've read somewhere, there's a guide how to change boot device in Windows, but I don't remember where... I don't think repair Install will fix that issue... urgh... I really forgot where I read the guide, google it...

zzz2496

 

[rjhorton]

Does this look familiar?

How to use the Sysprep tool to automate successful deployment of Windows XP

It's for xp but I think there are equivalent guides for vista/win7.

I'll try it out tomorrow.

 

[zzz2496]

Yup, that might work, it should "reset" everything (I used it a lot in the past to install 30 to 40 PCs at a time), good luck with it.