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Harddrive & WinXP

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by sbrager

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I recently added a new harddrive on the Secondary master IDE port of a client's desktop. He had 2 drives on the Primary IDE chain. The drive was recognized and Windows XP Pro came up and I was able to partition and format the drive with the latest version of Western Digital's software.

Then, I noticed that datacable to the slave drive on the Primary IDE chain had become unplugged. When the drive was plugged in, Windows started to come up but rebooted the computer during the Welcome screen. When I unplugged the new drive, Windows booted without problem.

What's going on? Does anyone have any suggestions about resolving this problem?

Thanks;

Stan
sbrager@socal.rr.com

7 replies

by omairziaee

sbrager,,

Your 2nd HDD have a virus,, format your 2nd HDD and then install it back,, I had the simmilar problem and my problem got resolved,,if you scan the virus u will not get it ,, so it better to format it..

by willie277

after you plugged it back in, did you try autodetect in BIOS? ...wait let's back up...on the POST screen does the drive appear?

How about chkdsk? Ever try it??

by bagmaster50

When you install another hard drive that isn't the primary you don't need to use 3rd party software to install it to XP. Disk management in XP will see the drive and allow you to partition and format it properly. It won't show as a drive letter in "My Computer" until it's formatted.

Try leaving all drives plugged in and boot to safe mode, then take a look at disk management to see if all drives are shown and how they are formatted.

From safe mode rightclick on each drive letter and schecdule a chkdsk for each drive on next reboot.

Be mindful, Window assigns drive letters first to primary drives then secondary drives. So, in effect the old 2nd drive on the primary controller will become drive "E" because the new primary drive on the 2nd controller will become drive "D" once formatted and showing in "My Computer".

by skdestiny

when that happened to me it was how i had the jumpers set. the first has to be master and second has to be slave

by plynn

The 1st thing to check is the back of the hd's. Make sure they are both set on AUTO.

By setting them to AUTO (or CABLE SELECT), you are letting the system determine which is Master & which is Slave. Both will show up if this is done.

by xerxes612

It may have been unplugged to begin with due to a bad controller. If he is sure, which I don't necessaryilly believe, I would check to make sure the jumper settings on the drives are correct - set all to cable select and it should resolve the problem.

by pmshah9

You said the new drive showed up with the primary slave disconnected you partitioned & formatted the new drive. Upon connecting the primary slave your XP does not boot.

Provided the bios supports the full cpacity of the new drive I suggest you try a different approach. Disconnect the primary slave. Boot into XP. Change the drive letters on the secondary master so that the original drive letters of the primary slave are freed. Reconnect the secondary slave & boot. You should be able to see all the 3 drives & all the partitions. This is how I solved a problem with USB connected drive when I added a new internal drive.

If the bios does not support the size of the new drive change the bios setting for the new drive to "None". It will not show up on any boot manager you might be using but will show up under XP.

This is how I got full capacity utilization of a 160 GB drive on a mobo which does not support capacity above 132 GB.

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