OS unable to load with new slave hard drive installed

[shirley230]

My systems a few years old, it's got a 900 mHz Athlon processor, GA-71XE4 motherboard, 512 RAM, CD/DVD Burner (2nd master), regular CD drive (slave), and a 30 gig Maxtor hard drive. The OS is Windows XP Pro.

I am trying to install a new 120 gig Seagate hard drive as a slave drive. Using the setup software and instructions, and uninstalling a 250 mb Zip drive (due to EIDE space restrictions, and adjusting the Bios to auto detect the drives I was able to get the drive up and running.

Then I rebooted; now the drive is recognized fine during startup, but I then get an error that reads "OS unable to load", and the system just hangs there.

Since then I've tried to uninstall/reinstall using the setup software that came with the drive; and I've also updated the Bios using gigabyte tools; this went smoothly with no problems but hasn't fixed the problem.

At this point I'm at a loss, and would greatly appreciate any assistance. Of course while I had the drive up and running I transfered about 15 gig of files to it which now I can't access, arrgh!

Thanks

 

[shirley230]

additional info

I forgot to include that everything runs fine when I don't have the Seagate 120 gig (slave) drive hooked up. It's only when it's hooked up that I get the "OS unable to load" error.

 

[patio]

Check in your BIOS, some boards allow boot to HDD 0 HDD1 or HDD2...
It should be set to the lowest #.

patio

p.s. Also the boot drive should be jumpered to "master w/slave and connected to the end of the IDE cable with the other drive jumpered to slave and connected to the middle IDE connector...

 

[shirley230]

It worked!

Thanks Patio,

Changing the BIOS to boot to HDD 0 did the trick!

:grinthumb Thanks!

 

[patio]

Excellent ! Glad you got it solved.