No Drives Are Attached, or Drives Are Powered Down

I was starting to build a second computer. I installed a Philips SPD2513BD DVD burner. I didn't notice that it was a SATA drive, and I was a little bummed about using up one of my two SATA connections, in this new computer, when I could have used one of the IDE/ATA connectors instead. But in the worst case I could swap it with the IDE burner in the other computer. I liked the specifications and the looks of this drive, and I had already paid shipping, so I decided to make a go of it. My plan for a quick and easy Windows XP Professional installation, on this new computer, was to use DriveImage 2002 to install a drive image PQI file containing a complete snapshot of an earlier WinXP installation. That way, I would not have to go through the whole rigmarole of installing Windows, sitting there hitting keys to get it to download updates, etc. I would just re-install this already complete previous installation, change a few hardware items, and be done with much of the installation chore. Unfortunately, it didn't work quite that way. When I tried to boot from the Drive Image CD, I got this error message:

No Drives Are Attached, or Drives Are Powered Down The Device Driver Is Not Installed

The message was obviously incorrect, insofar as it was coming from a CD that was loaded in the DVD drive. I had previously booted Bart PE and had seen, there, and also in an Ubuntu bootup, that the system was indeed recognizing both the DVD drive and the hard drive. I did a Google search for the error message, but came up with no answers. I was stumped. I searched for the error message in Google Groups as well. There, I got the idea to check the BIOS. No clues in the BIOS, but I then thought of trying to boot Drive Image from the floppy disk. (I had recently recopied Drive Image to fresh floppies.) But that gave me a Grub Error 22. Evidently this system was not willing to boot from the floppy, even though I did have it third in the BIOS bootup sequence. I tried moving it to first. That worked. The floppy booted. Apparently Grub had come preloaded ... or, as I thought about it, perhaps I had not completely reformatted the hard drive after installing Ubuntu on it. I postponed the Drive Image process to verify that, rebooting with PartitionMagic 8.0. Of course, it wasn't prepared to load that, either, not from the CD anyway, so I reverted to the original plan and proceeded to load Drive Image from the floppy, figuring I would fool with the partition issues later. But then -- I had forgotten -- Drive Image was able to identify and delete the partition, so PM wasn't needed. I was surprised and pleased that DI was able to read the PQI, given that it was saved on a DVD rather than a CD. I hadn't been sure that DVD technology was in the mainstream back in 2002. I still got Grub Error 22, so I researched it and got the advice to boot from the WinXP program CD, go into Recovery Console, and use FIXMBR and FIXBOOT. That solved the problem.