Windows XP Boot Sector

[majikman]

I'm having a problem with my Windows XP system giving me a disk boot failure when I startup the system. However, if I add another hard drive to the IDE cable, then it boots up fine. Therefore, I'm thinking that somehow, the bootsector was copied to the other hard drive during installation. The paragraph below will clear things up so you can grasp a better understanding of what I'm saying...

I installed Windows XP on a system that had two FAT32 harddrives. One was for the system disk and the other was a storage disk. The system disk was a 80 GIgabyte Western Digital(WD80BB/Master) and the storage disk is 120 Gigabyte Seagate Baracuda V (ST3120023A/Slave). If I start up the system with both disks plugged in, it works fine. If I take out the Seagate, then I receive a Disk Boot Failure error on startup. The harddrives are explicitly assigned Master/Slave by jumper configurations and not cable select.

I don't understand why its doing this. As far as I recall, Windows XP should have installed everything on the Master harddrive. Only a restore point and a recycle bin should have been installed on the Slave. Can someone please tell me what I can do to get the system to boot properly if I remove the Slave drive?

Another strange thing that happens is that the BIOS has a hard time trying to detect the drives when I take out the slave drive. It will take about 15 seconds for the BIOS to detect the single harddrive whereas it takes only a second if both harddrives are plugged in. Any insight into this will help also. Thanks.

 

[Direwolf20]

Hrrmm,wierd . Try plugging the primary HD into the other part of the IDE cable? Thats just a random guess. Also, try setting it to Cable Select when its all alone. Thats a better (but still random) guess.

 

[majikman]

nope... didn't work. i just realized that the bios was set to boot off of the slave drive before i installed windows xp, even though i installed windows xp into the master drive. could that be the reason that the boot sector was copied to the slave drive? if that is the case, how could i move it over to the master drive?

 

[[KFKAS]Death-Speak]

You should also check the jumper config on your hard drives. I've found that sometimes cable select jumper doesn't cut it...

DS

 

[arkamw]

Another strange thing that happens is that the BIOS has a hard time trying to detect the drives when I take out the slave drive. It will take about 15 seconds for the BIOS to detect the single harddrive whereas it takes only a second if both harddrives are plugged in. Any insight into this will help also. Thanks.

Also double-check your jumpers again. Most WD HDD's have different jumper settings for Single and Master w/ slave present. If you have it set on the latter, the HDD will be telling the system that there is another HDD on the chain and can cause issues. I've had problems with that in the past.

Did you wipe either drive on the install? If you wiped the system drive it wouldn't be too much work just to reinstall Windows to the system drive (this time without the storage drive in) to get it tow work again.

Otherwise, you could check that boot.ini looks something like the following:

[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /sos /noguioot

I think that if it were loading the system files off the second drive the above would read disk(1). Someone else might be able to verify that.

That might help, it might not. Keep us posted.

Cheers.

 

[majikman]

Also double-check your jumpers again. Most WD HDD's have different jumper settings for Single and Master w/ slave present. If you have it set on the latter, the HDD will be telling the system that there is another HDD on the chain and can cause issues. I've had problems with that in the past.

cool, thanks arkamw. that was the problem. not only did it fix the problem with the bios being slow, but that got the harddrive to boot.