I have two hard drives in my PC. Drive C and F (Maxtor 120G and 20G). One of them is beginning to make some odd noises, and occassionally the PC locks up or wont boot.

To try and see if it's drive F, I unplugged it but then W2k wont boot at all. I get the blue screen of death and a C000026C error saying it can't find a driver.

Is there some way in which W2K thinks some of the drivers are on the F drive. It used to be my main drive and does have a W2K install on it. How can I check?

Thxs

F is probably still your boot-disk.
Where are ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini located? If on F, there is your problem.
If you also have a full W2K on the C-drive, copy the root-files from F to C, and change boot.ini to start from the C-drive.
You will probably have to change the Master/Slave settings as well, if you want to disconnect F.

Also, where is your pagefile located? I "believe" if Windows doesn't find a pagefile, it won't boot.

Thanks for all your suggestions...but as they say " none of the above"

ntldr, ntdetect and boot.ini are all on the C: root directory.

Boot.ini points to the first drive C.

Page file doesn't matter.

More info.....the missing driver relates to my webcam for which I haven't installed the s/w. I'm guessing that W2K found this on it's own and put in the driver although the driver info says Creative when I would have suspected Microsoft. The missing driver is on the C drive and does not appear to be corrupted.

I wonder if during the plug and play phase W2K discovered a driver on F??

You could try (in the C-W2K) in regedit if there are any references to files on the the F: drive

Also see MSKB: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=160495

If you know the driver-name, boot in safe-mode and manually delete/rename it, then reboot

I looked in the registry to find the driver it's complaining about but that was in the %systemroot%. Not sure how to search for an F drive reference. Can you suggest how I might do this?

Before deleting the driver I might just try and disable it in the profile first.

Thxs

Go into Regedit, set the cursor in the left column on "My computer", then click Edit at the top, select Find and type in "F:\" without the quotation-marks.
When it finds one and it's not what you need, press F3 for the next find. Continue until the end.

I had the same problem about a year ago.
I formed a new small partition on my c drive,and copied everything from my 2nd disk to that new partition.
It is still there today,and now I can insert and remove a 2nd drive whenever I want.
I suppose there are other solutions,but this one works.

Cheers
Raticus