I have a Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard with a WD 36 gig Raptor SATA hard drive as primary using SATA pins in motherboard, running Microsoft XP, with service pack 2. I installed a Seagate 160 Ultra ATA/100 in the primary IDE slot and set it up as slave. First the computer would not recognize the Seagate. BIOS wouldn't automatically recognize it either. I finally installed the Seagate Utility Discwizard. It told me that my motherboard wouldn't accept the large size of the Seagate 'do I want to have the utility fix it' (paraphrasing). OK. Then it partitioned the Seagate, but only to 148 gigs. All was well. My computer recognized both hard drives. I then decided to move some files (I am a photographer with hundreds, if not thousands of images) to the Seagate. No problem. Copied and moved over to the new hard drive. I did this all prior to restarting my computer after setting up the Seagate. I then restarted my computer. At the DOS prompt it said there was an error in the OS and wouldn't boot. The BIOS showed that I have no primary hard drive. It shows the Seagate however . I took the Seagate out and the now I can boot up XP. BIOS still shows I have no primary, but it boots and I still see it in My Computer under C drive. However, everytime I put the Seagate back on line it won't let my Raptor boot.
My question is because I have the SATA drive cabled to the motherboard, instead of inline on the wide cable to my primary IDE slot with both drives on the wide ribbon, is this somehow overriding my primary? I believe I have all the jumpers in the right spots (master/Raptor/slave/Seagate). I should have copied all my files to the Seagate and then made it my primary, put I screwed up. Now I have irreplacable photos on the Seagate and don't want to lose them. HELP. Thanks up front for any help that you might offer.