Try booting with a Win98SE boot floppy and then run:

1sys c:

Then try booting from the SATA HDD.

OK, I'll give that a try in the AM. Thing is I've restored C: OS images so many times before without issue I was a little surprised. I know the sata drives are different, but they seem to work so well in slave/data mode with the adapter it caught me out..

If what I wrote before fails, try this:

1
FDISK and repartition with the Win98SE boot floppy.
You know the drill: Primary and active.

2
Boot from the Win98se cdrom and reinstall windows. It doesn't matter what you choose; just let it install again.

3
Verify that Win98SE boots from the HDD.

4
Using Ghost or whatever, restore the partition (not the whole drive) from your image.

I know it sounds crazy, but this has worked for me when other attempts have failed.

haha - now that sounds like the crazy stuff that works! Delayed for now but will be back in the "lab" later today...

This is turning into more of a puzzle.
1. sys c: trick didn't work.

I rebuilt 3gb boot partition C: off boot floppy, formatted FAT32. C: is visable/accessible in dos/boot disk mode.

2. Restored W98 image of current working IDE - no dice, still get "missing operating system"
3. Repeated boot drive re-build, began fresh W98se install. FDisk indicated C: was Primary/Active/FAT32 etc.
4. Began fresh Windows install. Setup scanned C without problem, but on 1st reboot (copy setup files routine), would not return to C: throwing a "in(something) system disk" error.
5. Fdisk showed that C: was now "Unknown" system - no longer FAT32.
6. Repeated the installation a few more times.

I tried a variety of alternate attacks to force the image over a clean P/A/FAT32 without luck. The problem seems to be the C: looses it's FAT32 access at some point.

Maybe it's the Seagate 80gb sata2? Works fine otherwise but maybe another make or sata generation would work. I also tried 3 different IDE/SATA adapters - same problem.

I'll take one more shot with another sata drive or two. The idea behind this experiment was to see what would be involved in migrating IDE based retro rigs to sata for when the day arrives the last IDEs drives bite the dust.

EDIT - SOLUTION: I tried a 40gb Maxtor sata150 (which I now remember I had already used as a W98se boot drive), and the migration/OS image restore went off without a hitch. Inclined to think some incompatibility exists with the Seagate sata300. Anyway it's done, but for the wasted hours..

I have no issues booting win98 off my SATA 250GB HDD on my K6-2. I use a Promise PCI SATA + IDE RAID controller card. Works in dos too as long as I use FDISK to make the BOOT partition.

tincup, kanecvr:

I appreciate your efforts. I've got an AMD Thunderbird system in storage that I built with an untested PCI-SATA adapter. Since then, I've been wondering if it would work when needed. Your comments here have given me some confidence that it will work.

Thanks! 😀

Have you set the OS partition as active? The "missing operational system" seems to be caused by that.

Some SATA 300 drives can be jumped to work as SATA 150. If it's a Samsung you can also do this with ESTOOL (had to do it to a 1TB SATA 300 drive that didn't seem to talk to a old PC-Chips motherboard on native speed, but worked under SATA 150 just fine).

Like my edit says I got everything finally squared away. Switching to a few Matrox sata150 drives and the problem went away. I'll try the Seagates again some other time - but for now it's not worth the effort to get to the bottom of it since I have working sets now.

I migrated 2 peripheral retro rigs to sata. The move freed up a pair of WD800's that match ones used on 2 other more period correct 'permanent' builds that I'm in the process of adding internal backup drives to.

One word of advice: get IDE/SATA adapters that come with a Master/Slave jumper. It makes setting up the imaging/data migration process far less fiddly. With the jumper I controlled the setup, without I had to be very careful which cables went to which IDE socket and which device plug the sata drive was connected to before and after the transfers.

One other thing: both systems involved were W95b/c. Very possibly there would have been no issue with the Seagate/sata300 under W98se.