Won't boot 1st time.. reboot.. then fine?

[gradius]

Here's a puzzling problem:

I have a Seagate 1GB and a Conner 540MB hard drives in my system. The 540MB is set to MASTER and 1GB to slave on the first IDE channel. The OS is on the 1GB but since the jumper fell off the drive, it is always set to slave. When I have just the 1GB hooked up to the system, everything boots fine. When I hook up the 540MB, the system halts when booting to the 1GB drive right before Windows98 loads. Sometimes it comes up and says it cannot find a bootable drive. (the BIOS settings are fixed to boot to the 1GB) Now, when I reboot the computer, it goes through all the motions just fine. And it's very consistent like that. I HAVE to always reboot once before the drive will boot. I have no problems or bad data once I do this. It's kind of annoying, and I was wondering what might be going on.

Thanks

[Nathan]

Try going to a local computer shop. Maybe you can get some company or person to send you a jumper. What kind of hard drive is it?

[sjs74]

Sounds like maybe the 540 meg drive is just aking too long to spin up. Try going into your bios and disabling the quick poweron self test. This will make your post take a few seconds longer but works great if you need it to wait for a slow hd.

Hope it helps

[philipg]

I have almost the same setup. Mine would boot when the Quick power on was enabled.

Original drive: 3.2 GB
add in drive : 540MB

The smaller drive must not be able to power up fast enough.

[gradius]

Thanks everyone for helping out. I turned off the Quick Power on option, and it booted the first time without any problems. Yeah, it does take longer to boot because it has to count all 128MB of ram, but it's better than having to boot twice! http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif