I have a system that I use a mobile dock/rack for swapping hardrives every now and then. Primarily I run Windows 98SE, the other night I desided to install Windows XP Professinal. In lieu of writting over my primary OS in fear of incompatibility issues with several programs that I use, I decided to install on another hardrive so that I can swap back and forth until I was completely happy with the new os.
The XP install was a snap and everything seemed to be working fine. However, it was getting late and the rest of the family wanted to get on the computer so I was going to have to swap over to the 98SE harddrive that had all the applications that my family needed to use, thats when the problem occured.
After shutting down, swapping to my 98SE harddrve and rebooting, system did not recognize harddrive or any of my cd drives. Gave me Invalid system disk…no disk was in floppy… yaddi-yaddi-yaddi.
I then rebooted, accessed bios and got no drive recognition other than floppy. tried several different approaches to no avail, i.e Fdisk, to see if it recognized, showed No Disk; cleared CMOS, no luck. I checked everything that a novice like me could check, no go.
I then thought, what the heck, what do I got to lose other than all my data. I took my 98SE harddrive and set the jumper to SLAVE, booted up got Slave detected, but not the Primary and again got Invalid System Disk. Went back to bios and set Primary/Master harddirve to “NONE”, and viola, it boots up. Everthing good to go.
Question #1: How was all this possible? (I am a novice, so please be gentle.)
Question #2: Is there some way that XP flashed my bios and locked itself to the primary hardrrive, and therefore making my other 98SE hardrive undetectable as a primary drive? (I’m fishing for a little conspiracy theory)
Thanks to all that apply.
ESD
