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Windows won't start when secondary HD is attached

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plautus

Member
I'm building a system from a barebones kit. I loaded XP on a SATA drive. That worked fine. Then I added a second IDE HD and now XP won't boot. When I unplug the new HD it boots fine. FYI, the new HD is jumpered slave (the optical drive is master). Also the secondary HD has XP loaded on it (it was the primary HD in my previous system.

Any advice? Thanks!
 
Well, here's the frustrating thing. When the IDE HD is plugged in, it shows up as the primary boot device. The SATA drive, although it's listed in BIOS, is not on the first device menu -- I can't choose it for the boot device. When I unplug the IDE HD, the SATA drive becomes the first boot device and the system boots normally.
 
Originally posted by: plautus
Well, here's the frustrating thing. When the IDE HD is plugged in, it shows up as the primary boot device. The SATA drive, although it's listed in BIOS, is not on the first device menu -- I can't choose it for the boot device. When I unplug the IDE HD, the SATA drive becomes the first boot device and the system boots normally.
Click to expand...

I find it strange that you can't select your boot order/device from the bios...but so be it. Leave them both plugged in, and start up XP again. When you get to the part to select the partition for installation, select the SATA drive. Windows will write some mbr information to the PATA drive, but you will still be able to use it for storage, etc.
 
Usually a BIOS will have boot device choices that enumerate types of devices to boot from, and then, somewhere else in the BIOS, you choose which particular one, of those types of devices, to actually do the booting from.

After you set HDD as the boot device, look for something on the boot menu screen in your BIOS to choose the boot order of the HDD's.
 
Maybe I made a mistake when I loaded XP on the SATA HDD without having the second HDD connected. If I take Tweakin's advice and have the second HDD connected while I reload XP, do I risk the data on the second (IDE) HDD? It's decently backed up, but it would be a pain to retrieve the data.

Thanks!
 
I think Billb2 may be on the right track.

Sometimes boot order menus are split into 2 pieces. The first choice called boot order lets you arrange the types of devices - floppy or removeable device, optical device, hard disk.

There should be a second choice called hard disks which lists all the hard disks and you can choose which hard disk is the bootable hard disk.

Sorry if this doesn't apply to your situation. But without knowing more about your motherboard and BIOS, it's hard to give specific answers.
 
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