Hi there everyone, I am new to this forum and was wondering whether someone may be able to help. I have scoured the net already but come up with no solutions.

I have a Dell Dimension 5100 16 months old.

The motherboard went so I bought a replacement MSI PM8PM-V and installed it. The board takes both SATA and IDE drives and has a RAID capability too.

I loaded win xp PRO onto a clean IDE drive and then transferred all my data from the SATA drive onto the IDE drive to backup.

I then Formatted the SATA drive into NTFS and tried to reload windows XP Home (the original version of windows) onto the SATA drive. I got the message coming up saying ‘NTLDR is missing pres ctrl+alt+delete to reboot’

I checked the bios settings and tried various things including

Checking the boot sequence to ensure the CDRom is first followed by the hard drive
Checking the RAID configurations and switching them on and off
Checking the SATA configs and changing them from SATA to IDE and back

None of this has made a blind bit of difference.

I have an old copy of win xp pro, the 1st edition, and when I put this is in the pc booted to the recovery screen, but when I pressed R the message was along the lines of ‘Drive C has not been recognised press f3 to restart’

So after playing around with floppies and bios settings (sata and IDE ones) I managed to get into the winxp recovery console. To test things I typed ‘dir’ and the result was as follows
‘An error occurred during directory enumeration’

I am currently reformatting the hard drive in NTFS again.

Any ideas, been at this for 2 days and I am getting very low in morale.

Many thanks in advance,

Lana

I haven't messed w/ SATA drives yet but I remember a mobo I bought a few years ago included a floppy w/ the drivers for the SATA connectors. Do you require something like that? I also think there was a special setting somewhere for booting from SATA.

Of course, this was almost 5 years ago some I'm sure the tech has improved, but it might be something to consider. You might just try booting from the IDE drive and then checking if Windows recognizes the SATA drive from there. You should have more troubleshooting options that way.

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Hi Thanks for your help.

I did not get a disk with the sata drivers on it, and I have tried succesfully installing xp on an ide drive and windows recognised the sata as a slave drive as well... I could access the drive and save files to it.

I shall do a search for sata drivers and see if anything come up, thanks.

Lana