Two hard drives, both with same copy of XP, black screen after windows loading screen

[Mr. Matt]

Hey

Ok, well it starts off with me managing to either corrupt windows or the hard drive on my original hard drive, and when ever I try to boot off there, I get to the windows loading screen (with logo and little green sliding bar) and then it restarts and keeps doing that. Tried booting in safe mode, and from disc but I cannot do anything with it in terms of booting.

So what I decided to do was get a second hard drive and install XP onto there, and then plug my second hard drive in and see if I can transfer files off there to the new one.

I got XP installed fine on it, but when it came to booting with both hard drives plugged in I came to problems. I set which hard drive is the priority one in the bios as there is no pins on the back of this new hard drive, and it got to the windows loading screen with the new installation (i know this because the loading screens are different for both hard drives). After the loading screen my monitors go black and nothing happens.

Windows loads fine when it is just the new hard drive plugged in, even if the old hard drive is plugged in and set to disabled it goes to the black screen.

If anyone is able to give some advice on what to do, or what could be wrong, I would be really grateful.

Thanks

Matt

 

[Rik]

Sounds like the old hard drive is faulty to me.

 

[trickyt]

Two hard drives with same version of XP on each.

I have a PC with several hard drives, each with the same version of XP, and at boot I choose which one to boot from.

The trick - and this is essential - to get this working is to ensure that on each install you only have one disk in the system, AND only one disk in the system when you first run XP.

After you have run XP once with each disk being uniquely installed, you can then plug all three or four disks in and choose which one to boot from (assuming your Win.ini file has been configured by you to do this).

Configuring your win.ini file is a doddle with any text editor, or using the msconfig tool. If you don't know what I am taliking about, just Google it.

Remember, if both old and new disks are plugged in when you re-install windows, or when you first boot, all disks but one will be set so they can not boot. Thats why you must get a working copy of windows on each disk individually and do a first windows run with all other disks unplugged, before you plug them all in together.