Could be that the battery for the CMOS is failing, although I would expect the first symptom of that to be that the clock to stops updating properly.
I would also have thought that you could intervene manually and just point the system startup at the correct drive/partition - I've done that before on multi-OS systems where I wanted to setup an extra booting partition - or a USB connected drive --- note the boot.ini wants selection(drive-id) not multi(connection-port) as the keyword for some drives. No reason that I can remember that there should be a problem copying a partition from/to a SATA drive unless it is the one containing the OS instance you are running at the time. There may be a need to set the resulting partition as active and bootable, you may also have to correct/restore the MBR on the destination drive. BUT remember the boot process is that the CMOS is set to look at particular drives/connections, or even partitions in a set order and your MOBO may not allow you to specify the appropriate/wanted device/location/facility or the MOBO may not allow particular options, and/or the system may be set to stop changes to the boot control entries on the cmos, or particular devices also the boot.ini and it's associated files may be on a different drive/partition from the one containing the OS you want to load (you can use the Acronis manager in place of the normal windows boot.ini facility, or as a pre-selection facility to pick a partcular boot.ini/os selection sub-set) Re the dos partition - I use one for a minimal set of system maintenance routines as that is a much smaller footprint than a full XP OS instance.. although an XpPe-Bart CD, or a booting USB stick will do that job on the current systems. Then again - for those with multiple drives . . . . Who needs it? Well there is the general websearch system that has a 120GB drive on the secondary port, and a caddy'd recovery (and Jims system/data) drive that goes in as primary master - it boots in preference to the real internal drive, and the 250Mb 'DOS' partition allows me to copy my OS partition over the one on the resident drive. JimB Oh! happy daze - just hope the above is of some help, although I suspect not! I'm just repacking an A1210 system for return to DABS.COM - they supplied one with a P-ATA drive rather than the advertised S-ATA drive They price the expected 80Gb Seagate S-ATA at another £120 approx ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mogens Holst" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, May 09, 2006 9:13 PM Subject: Re: How to change partition type? I do appreciate your comments and I have been struggling to solve this problem that has been aggravated by a problem with my mainboard that lost the ability to boot directly to any device. Sounds strange, but the only way I can boot is by calling the MB's boot selector during startup and there select Floppy, HD or CD. I ended up with a "new" HD and was able to use Acronis to copy the 4 partitions correctly this time, but I also learned that you can't copi a primary active SATA partition to a SATA HD and expect to be able to boot from it. So I said to myself, well , I'll just repair the Windows installation and all should be well, but the MB problem will not allow permit that because the sick MB can't handle the reboots during installation. I guess I can install Acronis boot manager on the SATA drive and select to boot from the PATA. Jim, my hard disks are partioned like this: C.\Windows system, D:\Swap, E:\Data and F:\Original program files. I have in the past had a DOS partition but I never found any use for it because I always had another HD installed with a small WinXP system that I could use to gain access to the regular system in case of problems. -- Mo -- ---------------------------------------- The WIN-HOME mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
