BIOS can't see both hard drives

[jaedaliu]

My parent's computer has some wierd NTFS.SYS file corrupt error, and I can't remember the password I used when I first installed the computer, so I ended up pulling the hard drive and installing in my computer, then copying NTFS.SYS off the XP CD into c:\windows\system32\drivers

After reinstallation, I got a "update did not finish" error, and it restored to a previous point, then i tried to install SP2, and that didn't finish after 18 hours of run time, so i just rebooted it, system got restored, and then I have the corrupted NTFS.SYS again. (i think SP2 installation upgraded the NTFS.SYS file, and the non-SP2 version of windows can't use it. (i copied the NTFS.SYS off my computer at first, and that didn't solve the original problem, only the CD version worked)

so anyways, back to my computer, except now when I plug both hard drives in my computer, both drives are missing from the boot screen, and my computer tries to boot off my floppy and CD drives. When I unplug one or the other, the one that's plugged in is recognized and the computer attempts to boot. Both drives are older IBM drives, one's 25 gig, other 10 gig. I doubt it's the power supply, I've ran both drives at once when I was copying the NTFS.SYS file, and everything was fine then.

well, I really don't know what it might be, anyone have any guesses?

thanks

-- James

 

[cholley]

could be a bad cable, 80 wire ide cales have specific temination and i have seen a few go bad, look at jumpers also, download DFT and make yourself a boot floppy and run diags on both drives

 

[jaedaliu]

jumpers are fine, when the other drive is unplugged (power or ide cable) the drives are recognized as master or slave (depending on jumper settings)

didn't think to replace the cable, I'll have to find my box of computer junk. thanks for the idea.

 

[lenjack]

Even though jumpers are fine, doublecheck them and then triplecheck them. They can be very tricky.