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Machine not booting when 2 HDs are attached

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by scansite

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Dear All,

I have 2 DiamondMax 21 320GB SATA II disks attached to an ASUS P5K motherboard.
The first disk has Win XP Pro SP2 on it. The second disk is formatted with NTFS, has a drive letter and is a primary active partition.

When I boot the machine with both HDs attached, it starts to power up and after half a second powers down again.

When I detach the second HD, the machine boots okay. Has anybody encountered this before?

The second disk has no OS on it, just some files.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Carl.

8 replies

by w2ktechman

First, try a different power connector. The one being used may be defective.

Your power supply may be failing, or is not powerful enough to add another component.

check the data cable to the second drive.

If everyhing looks good, try making the second drive primary, does it boot?

by renecastillo75

That's part of what I was going to suggest you. I would bet that your power supply is the one culprit. Apparently it's not strong enough to support all the devices you have attached to it.

That has happened to me in the past, and by replacing the PW with one of higher power the problem was solved.

I'd also suggest to check (BUT I REALLY DOUBT THAT WILL BE YOUR CASE) the generated heat inside your case. Usually when some devices 'as prevention' reaches certain temperatures they stop its function inmediately, to avoid being damaged. But since in your case, according to the info you provided, the power goes down after a couple of seconds, I'd reject this possibility.

by scansite

Thanks for your feedback Rene,

I also think the power supply is the culprit.

I don't have the time or money to replace it,
since the machine is for a customer.

As a workaround I have disconnected the 2nd drive and will only use it when I make an image of the C:\ drive.

On my own machine (ASUS P4C800-E) I have the same setup (2 SATA disks) and it works fine, but they are connected to a Promise SATA controller and not to the SATA connectors on the motherboard.

Next time I'll build a machine, I'll make sure the power supply doesn't have this problem.

Regards,

Carl.

by scansite

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback. I've verified that the power and data cables are okay.

The power supply is brand new and very silent, but I also suspect it to be the cause.

I've built many machines and never encountered this problem. My own machine (ASUS P4C800-E) als has 2 SATA disks and boots up fine. The only difference is that I don't use the onboard SATA connectors on the motherboard, but a separate Promise SATA controller.

I don't have the time and money to put a new power supply in the machine, so I have disconnected the second drive and only use it when I need to make an image of the C:\ drive.

I can't make the second drive the primary
because it only has data on it and no OS,
so I can't from it.

Regards,

Carl.

by scansite

Thanks for your feedback Wade,

SATA disks have no jumpers to make them master or slave. Only IDE disks have that.

Regards,

Carl.

by th75tig

The problem that you have encountered is that both of the disks have status boot in the primary partition. You can solve this problem by downloading a tool thats runs under linux op.

The tool is named gparted, it's at gnome based program.
1. Download this booteble disk from http://sourceforge.net/projects/rescuecd.
2. Boot your system with this cd in you drive.
3. When the system boots up, start up the program gparted. This program scans you computer drivers. A good ide is to name your drive partitions with distinguis names so you can find them easely in gparted by it's name insted of it's linux drive extention 'hda', 'hd2' etc.
4. Here is your answer to your problem: change the flag on your SATA disk thats doesn't contain the operativsystem so it dosen't have the flag 'boot'.
5. Click 'Apply'
Finish!

Observe! You may damage your system if you don't know what you are doing. Gparted is a very good tool for changing partion on a running system with out loosing data. But you can destroy data easely if you don't know what you are doing.

I hope this help's you solve your problem.
/Andreas Edin, Sweden, Uppsala

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