XP won;t boot with new slave HDD

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jeff
  • Start date Start date
J

Jeff

Trying to add a second (slave) HDD to my XP home edition
machine. New drive checks out ok, bios identifies,
formats, partitions, everything looks fine. But XP
generates a full screen text error message at startup that
says "Windows did not start normally, this is due to a
recent hardware change" then gives me options for starting
in Safe Mode, none of which work. Keeps cycling back to
this error message. Starts fine if I disconnect the new
HDD, but does this when connected.

Here's the confusing part: I can connect the new drive
alone as master, then use the system restore CD that came
with the PC to dump the original OS and software
configuration, and it will work fine in this state. Then I
can connect my original HDD as a slave, and it sees them
both and works fine. But it will not start from the
original drive with both connected.

Something about the XP setup on the old drive will not
accept a slave drive connected, even though a new drive
with the OEM restore dump will accept a slave drive. I
could rebuild this way, but I would rather not redo 3
years of softwware and setup, and it is not the drive
arrangment I want.

Need an expert on XP startup that knows why this might be
happening and how to fix it. THanks
 
Jeff,

Set the jumpers for both drives to "cable select" rather than "master/slave"
and see if the problem clears. Some drives are funny like that.

Nospam
 
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