Windows Screen Pauses

[imported_Solace666]

Hey Guys,
I just opened my machine and added another hard drive. After I put in the new hard drive the machine boots up only to the Windows XP loading screen and pauses. It pauses as the word windows fades in so it's only partially there. Also, after putting my machine back together all the PATA devices are not seen by the bios. My main hard drive that I boot off of is a SATA drive and it sees that but there are two other PATA drives and my DVD-Rom drive, none of which are now seen in the bios. I've looked at all the connections and removed the new hard drive from any connections and can't seem to figure out what is wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am going out of my mind trying to figure out what is wrong. If you need any more info let me know. Thanks.

 

[BadThad]

Did you master/slave jumper the PATA drives correctly? Break it down better, list primary master/slave config and secondary master/slave config.

 

[imported_Solace666]

Right now only one PATA drive is connected and it's set to cable select. This is how the config was when it worked. I have one Seagate SATA that is the system disk and one Seagate PATA that is data disk. What worries me is that the NEC DVD-ROM drive does not even open or power up with the system. And shouldn't windows atleast boot up without the other disk? It's not used for any system files. Confused.

 

[BadThad]

Cable select is garbage. Change the PATA drive jumper to SINGLE. Let me understand here, you're not giving me enough info:

- one SATA boot drive
- one PATA data drive on the primary IDE channel?
- one CDROM drive on the secondary IDE channel as MASTER?

If your config is different, this is what I suggest:

- PATA data drive on the PRIMARY IDE channel jumpered as SINGLE
- CDROM drive on the SECONDARY IDE channel jumpered as MASTER
- SATA drive, fine where it's at

Windows can hang at start-up if it can't figure out how to configure the drives.

 

[imported_Solace666]

That is the setup. Is there a reason the BIOS wouldn't be able to see the drives? It sees the SATA but not the DVD drive or the PATA drive. I'll try the setup you recommend.

 

[BadThad]

Originally posted by: Solace666
That is the setup. Is there a reason the BIOS wouldn't be able to see the drives? It sees the SATA but not the DVD drive or the PATA drive. I'll try the setup you recommend.

Try going into the BIOS and changing the drive types to MANUAL, it should auto detect the correct settings. Are you sure there's power to the drives? When you start the PC, you should definately hear the PATA hard drive initialize. Reseat the cables too, don't just feel it they're tight, pull em all the way off and put them back on.

 

[imported_Solace666]

I'll try all this after work today. Hope it works. Just annoying that I really didn't do anything and it stopped working. Hard to identify what's wrong. Thanks for your help so far, I'll update later tonight.

 

[imported_Solace666]

Got it to work after taking out new hard drive. Now it won't power up for some reason... off to find out why.