Can't Boot to WinXP with Secondary HDD connected

[eeric]

Basically my 250GB Seagate died a while back, I sent it for RMA, got an 80GB Western Digital, installed XP SP2, used it for a while. Now I got my Seagate back, but since its a refurbished product I decided against putting my OS on it, and to use it as a secondary storage HDD only.

When I connect the Seagate as a secondary drive, once I try to boot to WinXP from my 80GB drive, the system will reboot shortly after pausing at the Windows loading screen. I have tried formatting the 80GB as NTFS, and partitioning the 250GB as 2x120GB NTFS, and doing a clean WinXP install. The first time it boot up it seemed fine. Afterwards, it would again reboot after I see the loading screen for a split second. They are both S-ATA drives, I have updated my BIOS, have the newest nForce4 drivers, and just can't seem to find out why this is happening. I believe my BIOS settings are right (well the boot order is), and no I don't want to raid. Seagate and MSI sites are pretty useless after searching through them. Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

This is my setup:
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
AMD X2 3800+
ATI X800XL
OCZ Premier 2x512MB DDR PC3200 (400MhZ) DIMMs (not overclocked nor set with aggressive timings)
Antec SmartPower2.0 450Watt PSU
80GB Western Digital 7200RPM S-ATA drive
250GB Seagate 7200RPM S-ATA drive

 

[wanderer27]

It's been a long time since I set mine up, but are there still jumper selects on the SATA's? If so I'd suspect these aren't set correctly.

 

[eeric]

on the WD drive there are some jumpers, but they are meant for spread spectrum enabling/disabling, for sata there's no longer "master"/"slave" since its 1 drive per "channel".

 

[wanderer27]

Did you install XP with both drives hooked up at the same time? I seem to recall seeing problems with this before.

Disconnect the secondary drive and do a clean install on your boot drive. After everything is setup/installed, go back and reconnect the secondary drive. I'd format it from the Admin utilities under XP at that point.

Alternatively, there may be another setting in your BIOS as to boot sequence. It would probably be under the IDE or SATA section and may allow you to determine which drive is looked at first etc.

 

[eeric]

yea it was a clean install without the 250gb drive. that didn't work, so i connected both and did another clean install. the boot sequence is right in bios too (confirmed by the fact that i can see windows loading screen). i'm lost, it may just be something conflicting in the nvidia southbridge?

 

[mechBgon]

Try Seagate's SeaTools diagnostics and give that 250GB drive a full test. http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

 

[John]

I'd recommend running 2 passes of memtest86+ before you do anything. Afterwards clone the 80 to the 250, then disconnect the 80 and see if you still reboot. If not you may have a flaky psu.

 

[eeric]

thanks for the responses all,

i've run the seagate tools before, it says theres a metadata file error under file structure test. i did research on this before and it seemed its really common with seagate drives, and for the most part it cant be fixed and it doesnt cause errors. (seagates tool if i remember right said its also just a preliminary warning and that it has to be confirmed by other scans like a WinXP file scan, etc). since it was "recertified by seagate" though, i dono if the hard drive is bad or not but i've already contacted seagate about this question.

as for memory, my memory should be fine, i've run memtest86+ on it before as well as goldmemory.

right now my suspicions are as follows:
1) i just ran a virus scanner about 5 min ago and found a virus affecting my MBR (although i did a clean format on both drives...) this could definitely be the problem
2) bad hdd
3) psu?