Hello-

New member here. Hopefully someone can guide me in the right direction.

I have a Gateway desktop and decided to upgrade my original 80GB hard drive with a new Maxtor 300GB SATA drive. (The current drive is making a loud metallic buzzing noise, and something tells me it's about to fail soon, so I'm trying to upgrade before disaster strikes, plus I do want/need a larger drive.) I had to install a Serial ATA PCI card for connecting the drive, since I don't have a SATA conection on the motherboard. Connected everything fine, installed the proper adapter card drivers, and ran the MaxBlast 4 program that came with the drive, to do a complete copy of everything fom my current drive to the new one (including system files, according to the copying utility program). Rebooted fine (from the old drive, with both drives still connected at this point), and according to Windows, the new drive is up and running fine. I can see it listed in Windows Explorer, with a complete copy of everything on my original C: drive which is exactly what I wanted, I can read and write to it, etc. At this point, I shut down, disconnected the original drive, and restarted my computer, with the hopes that it would now boot from the new drive (this is all according to the MaxBlast instructions). However, the new drive wouldn't boot, I just got a black screen with a blinking line cursor in the upper left. After some investigation, I thought I needed to reconfigure the boot device in system BIOS, but nothing for the new drive shows up in my choices for boot preferences. I then found in the installation manual the following: "If you are using a SATA PCI card, there is no need to enter BIOS setup to enable SATA support. The card automatically enables SATA support after the system BIOS has loaded."

I am pretty sure the drive itself is installed just fine, so now, how can I get this to be the boot drive? I'm obviously missing something here....what? Any help will be appreciated. Thanks! Walt

Hi & welcome to PCHF

What program did you use to take an image of the old drive? Do you have any partition software?

I used the MaxBlast 4 program that came with the new Maxtor drive. It allowed me the option to "Add the drive as the new boot device", which did a complete copy of everything from my old drive to the new drive, including all operating system files. I was also allowed to choose the number, size and type of partition to create, and I chose to make one partition on the new drive at its full size (300GB). After the drive-to-drive copy, I was told in the install manual to shut down, disconnect the old drive, and restart, and the new drive would be already designated at the boot drive, but as I said, that did not happen. Still trying to work things out on my own here, but I am stumped.