2nd HardDrive required to boot off of first

[Dave In Sidney]

Hi!

A while back I upgraded my hard drive by adding a second drive. I moved the old primary to secondary and reinstalled WinXP Home on the new disk, keeping the old disk as a backup and as a source for copying files. All has been well for months and the problems occur when I try and remove the second disk - the BIOS doesn't recognize the primary as bootable or even as a disk - the boot sequence shows the first device as not available! It does boot off of Floppy or CDROM in this configuration, tho. I've set the jumpers on the primary to both master and CSEL, tried both the master and slave connectors on the ribbon cable (slave when CSEL, of course) and nothing seems to work. Reconnecting the second drive makes all the problems go away again.

My hardware is:
MB - MSI KT4VL
BIOS - AMI 07.00T 7/28/04 (A6712VMS V1.C 102104)
Primary HD - WDC WD800BB
Secondary HD - Maxtor D749X

Any and all help, suggestions, advice or criticism is welcomed.

TIA,
Dave

 

[Tedster]

did you move temp or system files to the second drive?

If so, Windows may be looking for them when you boot up.

 

[Dave In Sidney]

Nothing's been written to the drive since it moved into "secondary" status. The pagefile is the most recent file in the root and it hasn't been touched since I switched over.
The problem is that the BIOS isn't recognizing the disk if it's the only one there - it keeps "searching for primary disk" (or words to that effect) then "searching for secondary disk". IIUC, this is before it even searches for an MBR and long before it looks for the OS.

 

[Tedster]

the only other thing I can think of is your jumper settings on the drives themselves.
Were they hard jumpered or cable select?

 

[Dave In Sidney]

I've set the jumpers on the primary to both master and CSEL - no difference in results.

 

[Dave In Sidney]

Problem Solved - Operator error

The 3rd time I looked at the jumpering I saw what I should have seen the first time

 

[Tedster]

are the drives in a RAID configuration?