2nd HardDrive required to boot off of first

[Dave In Sidney]

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
Hi!

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

[nchan10111]

Were you still booting from the second hard drive after you put in the first one? Does the second hard drive still have a OS one it? and most importantly did you format the first hard drive as a logical partition to the first one...if so then the second could still be the primary.

[Dave In Sidney]

Much thanx for the quick response!
- I was trying to boot off of the Primary drive (the new one) - power and data had been disconnected from the 2nd.
- The 2nd drive still has WinXP, but - AFAIK - is not being booted from when it is in the system.
- The Primary drive was not formatted as a logical partition to the older drive (not sure how I could do this in any case...) Both the Primary and secondary drives each have a primary bootable partition and a second logical partition.

Dave

[nchan10111]

Double check the jumper settings on the drive. The first drive should be now set to master and connected to the outer most ide end.

[BipolarBill]

Jumper both drives as cable select and leave them that way. It's easier and pretty much foolproof as long as you always use the end connector first.

[Dave In Sidney]

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