Hi, T.J.
Not enough time to digest this info today, and I have to run now and will be
busy most of the next couple of days. Lots of info there, and your system
is pretty far from typical.
One quickie observation, though: You said, "I hooked the 120 gb to the
promise and that is when windows stopped booting." And that you were told,
"that xp places 2 files on that Primary Master hd and can then install to
the rest of the files to the drive selected." I'll bet your basic problem
is in these two statements.
When the computer starts, it's awfully ignorant. All it knows is what's
stored permanently in the BIOS, as amended by the CMOS. It looks for the
first sector on the first physical drive it finds, reads the partition table
and MBR code from there, and uses that to find the "system partition".
Typically, this is the first partition on the primary master drive, which
becomes Drive C:. The first sector of this partition is the "boot sector",
which has just enough code for the computer to find a file named ntldr (no
extension), and the only place it knows to look is in the Root of that
system partition. So, the file must be C:\ntldr, which knows how to load
and read C:\boot.ini, which points to the location of ntoskrnl.exe and the
rest of WinXP. If you read C:\boot.ini (it's hidden, system and read-only),
you will see that it points to the "boot folder" (\Windows, by default) on
some partition, but it does not use "drive letters". It refers to the
partitions by rdisk(#)partition(#), numbering the HDs starting with zero and
the partitions starting with one on each physical disk. If any of this
physical disk/partition configuration changes, then ntldr and
C:\ntdetect.com can't find WinXP, so it can't load Windows and start. And
every time the computer boots, all this starts from scratch, with NO memory
of how things were organized yesterday - or this morning.
Gotta go now. Think about this and I'll try to get back in a couple of
days.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
T.J. Armstrong said:
Sorry I didn't think I left out that many details, but I must have
overlooked them. My computer is a custom build, it has a ASUS board (can't
tell you which one exactly, because I do not have the information with me at
this location), it runs an AMD Athelon Thunderbird. It supports up to 8
drives using IDE and two drives using the promise port. I currently have
the older 40 gb unhooked in hopes of simply installing windows and getting
this beast up and running again. The goal originally was to simply add the
120 gb hd as additional storage (which is still the 1st choice in this
situation). I did something similar to what you said, doing my best to
match the jumpers to the pictures as they were listed. I hooked the 120 gb
to the promise and that is when windows stopped booting. It would go
through BIOS, get to the same screen everytime that mentions some error
(that I no longer recall since it has been a month and a half without having
it work) and it said I needed to reboot. After rebooting, it would come to
the same screen, it was a big cycle. I tried changing the settings,
thinking maybe I had them wrong, but that didn't seem to get windows up
either. I currently have the 13 gb (which can now be removed completely
from the system with the addition of a larger harddrive) which was set as
the Primary master when xp was originally installed, a dvd-rom drive set as
primary slave I believe, and as of right now my cd burner is set to
secondary slave (which is a problem I know, it is not recognized by bios
because nothing is on the secondary master, but I didn't feel like messing
with the jumper on that because of location in my case). Also, I have a zip
drive that is not set to anything at this time, but it would be nice to have
it plugged in again on one of the ide spots (probably secondary master would
work unless there is a better way to set it up). My 40 gb hd was originally
on the 1st part of the promise drive and has remained there, with the 120 gb
hd being set to the second spot. As of right now, I have the 40 gb unhooked
to see if I could get windows xp to load on the 120, but it freezes every
time regardless (why, I do not know). It is recognizing the both drives on
the promise when they are hooked up.
My windows folder is on my 40 gb hd (set on promise port 1st spot) which
was set as the C drive back in the day that the computer ran. Now, I was
told that since another hard drive was plugged in to the Primary MAster when
xp was installed, that xp places 2 files on that Primary Master hd and can
then install to the rest of the files to the drive selected. I am not sure
of the valitity of this comment, but you may know more.
Also, the recovery disk it is asking for I believe is one you can making
using xp so that if there are any problems, you can insert said disk and it
will recover from a working set of files. This does me no service seeing as
I can not make one of these disks now, but it is a useful note for the
future.
Oh, and also, I tried to use put everything back to where it was
originally and it still wouldn't boot, so I don't know if I have something
in a different place than before or if there is a ghost that haunts my
computer. Any and all help troubleshooting this problem is greatly
appreciated. Hopefully this additional information, though wordy will help
paint a more clear picture. Thanks for helping me fill in some oversights
RC. Thanks in advance for any suggestions. Hopefully I answered all your
questions.
T.J. Armstrong
Also, both the controller and channel are enabled in bios and I am using
brand new 80 wire cables that I purchased after the old ones didn't seem to
be working. (I got bribed into bying them so my buddy would help me work on
this computer, so there are two of us stumped here)
