Boot hangs after I install second hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Greg Wilton
  • Start date Start date
G

Greg Wilton

I am installing XP Pro from scratch. If i only have the
primary drive installed everything works fine. When I add
a second drive, the PC will not boot, it completes the
memory check and hangs during the disk test. (/SOS in
boot .ini) Even if I remove the second drive the PC will
not boot. If I start in safe mode, the PC boots and both
drives work normally.

If I run CHKDSK /R from the recovery console it hangs as
well, usually at 50%.

My motherboard is an Intell Desktop board with integrated
IDE. Both driver are Western Digital. The C drive is off
the Primary IDE channel with the CD-ROM as the second
device. The second drive (E:) is the only device on the
Secondary IDE channel. First I had the jumpers set for CS
but switched to master settings in an attent to resolve
the problem.

At this point I have no other applications on the machine.

The reason I don't just put both drives in and install XP
is because I want the second drive in a removable chassis;
and when I tried that, I couldn't boot the machine with
the removable drive removed.

Thanks is advance for any guidance.
 
Hi, Greg.

If you haven't "locked down" the drive letters by specifically assigning
them in Disk Management, then WinXP starts fresh and re-letters them
according to its own defaults each time you reboot. So, Drive E: might not
be Drive E: for this session. How many volumes (primary partitions and
logical drives in the extended partition) do you have on each HD? What
about your CD/DVDs, networks drives, etc.; anything that uses a drive
letter?

Many users still haven't found Disk Management. Type at the Run prompt:
diskmgmt.msc

In addition to taking over the jobs of creating, deleting and formatting HDs
(which we used to do with FDISK and Format.exe under MS-DOS and Win9x/ME),
it also handles assigning and reassigning "drive" letters, which we did with
Device Manager in Win9x/ME.

If you assign your CD/DVD drives letters further down in the alphabet (V: or
DVD and W: for Writeable?), then they are less likely to jump around as you
add and remove HDs and partitions. And HD volumes don't have to be lettered
sequentially, either.

My WinXP Pro Resource Kit says the /SOS parameter in Boot.ini "displays the
name of each device driver as it loads". I see nothing there about a "disk
test". The page I'm reading is online at:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tr...prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/prmc_str_bjap.asp

(I'm not sure what's going on with MS website security these days. I had to
temporarily disable Norton Internet Security 2004 to get past the
"gatekeeper" into the Resource Kit website; then I re-enabled NIS and was
able to navigate to the page.)

RC
 
Thanks for the input.
I have not "locked down" the drives but I'm not having
trouble with the letters changing, it just won't boot. But
I'll give that a try.
The /SOS displays the drivers being loaded and also
displays other messages. The memory check and disk check
are among them.
 
Western Digital hard drives have a single drive setting
(no jumper). Try removing the jumper from the hd that is
alone on the secondary IDE.
Have seen this problem before, however the CS setting
should have worked as well.

Hope this helps
 
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