Weird booting issue

[jbubrisk]

Hi all,
I have a strange problem. I have 2 IDE drives, a maxtor and a western digital, in my machine. The WD is a secondary drive, so I wanted to disconnect it to hook up my GF's old drive. When I disconnect the drive, OR change the drives to ANY other configuration, the computer wont boot. I get "NTLDR is missing" errors, "boot disk no found", etc. The ONLY way it works, is to select the boot drive after the Bios posts, and then select the WESTERN DIGITAL, THE SECONDARY DRIVE???? And then the computer boots fine! The other weird thing, was that when I originally installed the drives, my primarry came up as the D: drive, and my secondary as the C: (its still like that). I also have a SATA drive, but that is secondary, and doesn't seem to interfering with anything. In the bios, the drives show up normally, and I've double checked the jumper settings on the drive, as well as tried new IDE cables, and switch their positions. I even tried putting the WD on the channel that has my dvd burner and that didn't work. Any ideas??????

Thanks in advance, John

 

[jbubrisk]

FYI I have a biostar motherboard with an AMD2 X2 3800+. I have also tried restoring default bios settings with no luck

 

[D1gger]

It sounds to me like for some reason Win/XP (I assume you are running XP from the error message) put it's Master Boot Record (MBR) on the "C:" drive, and if I understand you correctly, your C: drive is actually your WD drive and the remainder of the operating system files are on your Maxtor drive which shows up as "D:".

If this is the case, you will need to specify the maxtor drive as the primary boot drive (after your CD) in your BIOS, and then boot from your XP CD and enter the recovery console.

Then perform a FIXMBR from the console and it should write a new boot record onto the maxtor, and the maxtor should now be seen as C: and the WD should become the D:.

"Warning" This may screw some of your application programs as they may have references in the registry to D: that should now refer to C: and vice-versa.