Changing channels on a hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Al Nagurski
  • Start date Start date
A

Al Nagurski

Hello all,

I have a couple of problems with moving my hard drive around .
1) When I set up XP on my machine, I mistakenly connected my hard drive to
the secondary IDE channel. When I tried to move it to the primary channel, I
got a message that read "primary master hard disk fail" on bootup. This
occurs whether I jumper it to master or slave, with or without another drive
on the same cable. As soon as I connect it back to the secondary channel as
master, it boots normally. What do I need to do to be able to move a hard
drive with XP installed to a different IDE channel? The BIOS is set to auto
detect my IDE drives, and it does recognize the drive. A few seconds after
it recognizes the drive, It gives that fail message (with the accompanying
sinking feeling, at least the first couple of times) and goes no further.
Selecting different boot devices and changing the order in the BIOS seems to
have no effect. This is, of course, not a critical issue, as everything
appears to be working fine with the boot drive back on the secondary
channel, but it is annoying, and I very much want to find a fix (other than
the obvious, re-installing XP).

2) On a possibly related note, I have another machine set up for Dual Boot
(98 SE and XP Pro) and want to be able to remove the Win 98 drive. Again,
when I simply remove said drive, the computer won't boot. Changing the IDE
location for the XP drive makes no difference. Replacing the 98 disk makes
everything happy again.

I suspect (hope) that the solution involves a simple registry entry, or
perhaps something accessible through the console.

I have Windows XP Pro, all XP drives are NTFS.

If anyone needs more info, please ask. I will respond as soon as possible.

I've searched several NGs and help files, and haven't found a useful
solution to these problems, I will greatly appreciate any assistance with
these difficulties.

Chuck
 
go to control panel then system then advanced then open
startup and recovery click edit delete all text save.
then switch chanels and reboot
 
microsoft said:
go to control panel then system then advanced then open
startup and recovery click edit delete all text save.
then switch chanels and reboot
Click to expand...

First, thanks for your time and very quick response.

I tried this about 12 times, and about 10 different ways. No positive
results. Just to be sure that I'm doing this correctly, the procedure that
you gave me opens the boot.ini file, right? I delete the contents, leaving
boot.ini empty/blank. I save this now empty file, then shut down, then
change the IDE channels, then boot, yes?
 
Question 2:
Your Win98 HD is drive first HD (C:) , right?
If Win98 was installed on C: before installing XP, then setting XP up for
dual boot with Win98, that drive C: contains a few necessary XP boot files.
If you remove the first HD (C:), you have to boot the XP CD, run repair
console and say fixboot (?, with W2k/XP I have no eXPerience)
 
First, thanks for your time and very quick response.

I tried this about 12 times, and about 10 different ways. No positive
results. Just to be sure that I'm doing this correctly, the procedure that
you gave me opens the boot.ini file, right? I delete the contents, leaving
boot.ini empty/blank. I save this now empty file, then shut down, then
change the IDE channels, then boot, yes?
Click to expand...
Not quite as there is more that the boot.ini file, you need to refresh
the mbr and boot files on the system disk.
You can boot off the XP CD and goto the recovery console and enter
FIXMBR to repair the Master Boot Record and possible use DISKPART to
check that the current partition is set Active etc.

Peter Hutchison
Windows FAQ
http://www.pcguru.plus.com/winfaqs.html
 
Back
Top