It’s lost on him that the course diagram I posted are various POINTS in the course connected by straight lines, NOT a continuous course line.

Did you train at Redstone Arsenal?

So what about booting up and then adding the drive (you can hot plug a SATA drive).

Excellent! And a very professional job.

If there are no pipelines/gas stations where will the hydrogen come from? If the plan is to electrolyze it at home, what do you do on a long trip? And electrolyzing water to make hydrogen takes more energy than the hydrogen produces (and you’d have to compress and cool it), so why not just use electricity and avoid the middleman?

Have you set the BIOS to boot from USB? If you have, it should boot whether or not it recognizes the drive. If in doubt, unplug the drive, boot from USB, install the OS from USB, and then add the drive. Therwol’s suggestion could also be correct - GPT is fairly recent, and a BIOS looking for MBR won’t “understand” GPT/UEFI

Forgot to add: in order for the BIOS to call the OS boot loader, it must first call the disk adapter’s API so it can access disk. I can’t speak for Adaptec SATA cards, but I have used/configured a LOT of Adaptec SCSI cards, and many have a jumper to automatically load the API during the BIOS - you can see it on the screen before the OS loads. Hence the reason for finding the Adaptec manual. And it may be that when the Adaptec card was released, there was no on card support for larger SATA drives, so worst case, you may need a new card, and that could be an issue in finding a driver for an old OS. I wonder if you partitioned the drive into two 500GB partitions, it would load?

To access modern HTTPS (secure sites), you need SSL2 and TLS. You can turn on SSL and install TLS in Win XP SP3 ONLY. Win 8/8.1 should have SSL enabled by default, but if TLS isn’t enabled, you enable it here: https://hide.me/en/knowledgebase/how-to-enable-tls-1-1-tls-1-2-in-windows-7-and-8/

BTW, Win 8 is such a terrible release, any pain one receives by running it is self inflicted

You’re talking about a LONG obsolete OS (released 23 years ago) used by VERY few people instead of Win 10 that was just updated a few years ago and still used by hundreds of millions of users. MAYBE someday what you suggest will be true, but for 99.999% of the users, they will have moved on to new HW and OS by then. In general, the only people dabbling in decades old HW and SW are those trying to use legacy HW or aps, and those are VERY few.

If it feels like a pissing contest to you, it’s because you persist in making inane arguments and trying to defend your indefensible statements such as the above “a sudden right turn” (there was NO sudden right turn). I think I’ve wasted enough time on this.

Likely the BIOS (have you checked for an update) or the SATA card’s API/driver (check Adaptec) or both. The BIOS interacts with the disk API to load the OS. I’d look for the Adaptec instruction manual for the card. I’d also look to see if there are any jumpers on the card.

Why? There are a wide variety of free web browsers that cost nothing to install or update (ie: Firefox)

What OS and what file system?

A track for track image does take a LONG time, especially if one disk is an external connected via a slow USB port. Acronis is no better (tried them both), maybe even slower form my experience.