2hd but only the 1 works

[rainman202]

I have one new hd 80gb westen digital, and old drve seagate 40gb,
The seagate was the master runnin windows xp ntfs
today i unplugged the seagate installed windows 98 se then upgrade to windows xp on the maxtor fat32. but for some unknown reason wen tryin to boot with just maxtor as master, i get to the windows xp screen and it says that it need to do a scandisk or somethin of c: drive it does this and then the pc shuts down and it restarts and gives me a choice of safe mode last know good con fig and so on, i choose last know good con fig and still the pc wont boot into windows, tryed normal start up and it keeep askin to do a scandisk of c: drive it says sorry windows had a problem check ur hardware and any new software...
got into safe mode and all looks fine to me :confused:
It did run for a while ok, without problems untill i went to switch it back on 2nite, ive now unplugged it and still usin my seagate 40gb ... im just glad i didnt format that, or i wouldnt be able to post here
:eek:
Any help on this would be gr8 thanks alot

Mike

[BipolarBill]

You said you had two drives and then mentioned a W-D, Seagate and a Maxtor.

Could you please tell us again with the proper drives?

FYI - you must always install the oldest OS first. You must always use the initial C drive as the boot drive - never remove it. The reason is because the maste boot record must reside on one drive. When you remove a drive, install and then replace the drive, you will have two primary disks and two MBRs. That's bad.

[rainman202]

oops sorry.. the old drive is a seagate 40gb ntfs was the master, now no jumper so as set as slave,

Other drive new one is a maxtor 80gb fat32 with a clean install of windows 98se then upgrade of xp,

If i then unplug the maxtor (master) and plug back in the seagate (slave) the pc will boot as normal again :confused:

Thanks

[BipolarBill]

1. So you're saying that you installed Win98 and upgraded to XP with just the Maxtor? Everything fine until when? I assume that the upgrade went well, so what did you change between the upgrade and now?

I'd like to see your BOOT.INI file. Find it, open it and save as a TXT file. Attach it to your response. You should be able to connect the Maxtor as slave and then get it off of the new drive.

[rainman202]

Hi, thats rite, i had my new drive maxtor 80gb set up as master fat32, installed win98se then upgraded with win xp cd.. all went fine ..untill i turned off pc, put it back on again l8er and then it just wouldnt boot in normal mode.. sometimes it would say verifin dmi pool data.. or something like that and it just stopped or sometimes it would get to the windows xp logo and go no further.

But anyway what happend after that was i though i would try to reinstall off my windows xp cd, and things just went from bad to worse.. i ended up with my windows xp running but all i had on my desktop was the recyle bin, nuffin else...so i tryed an installing xp over itself again and still nothing....

So i gave up and and fdisked it and formatted it ... and have now reinstalled windows 98se and upgraded to windows xp this saturday afternoon, and have it connected as:

Maxtor 80gb windows xp fat 32 (master) new drive
Seagate 40gb windows xp ntfs (slave) old drive
wen im sure that the maxtor is workin fine i intend to format the seagate and just use it as a back up... :)

Thanks very much... with my lucky im sure ill be back

[BipolarBill]

You know - you do not have to actually install Win98 and upgrade. Just boot from the XP CD and it will ask you to put the Win98 CD in to verify. If Win98 is on a copied CD or you're installing it from a hard drive, you're doing it the only way you can.

It's just that upgrading is always a crapshoot. Avoid it if you can.