can't boot with hd on primary

[sportysk]

I recently tried to set up a dual boot system using xosl and now I'm having grief. I had an old hd with win98 and all my drivers loaded that wasn't installed when I was experimenting so I figured I could just reformat my 40gb drive and ghost the image from the 2gb drive and away I go, but my computer will not boot when either of these drives are installed on the primary ide channel on the mobo. If I connect them to the secondary ide channel either one will boot the system ok fine. The primary ide channel still works because i now have my cd burner and dvd drives connected to it and they work fine. I want to put my hd's back on ide 1 and my burner and dvd back on ide2 channels.
Did I screw up a setting or something? It doesn't matter if I set the BIOS to boot from hdd-0 or hdd-1.

 

[Blujacket]

You should be able to change the data cable for the CD drives to the Secondary IDE channel and the hard drive to the Primary IDE channel. The jumper on the hard drive has to be set for Master or Single/Only drive and on some cables has to be on the end plug. Maybe the hard drive setup in your computer uses Cable Select [cable marked as such] and the drives have to have the jumper/s on CS. Newer hard drives use the 80-conductor cable for the ATA/UltraDMA 100/133 access [it has a stiffer feel to it] and most I have used have the Master at the end and the Slave at the middle plug.

 

[sportysk]

I am using an 80 pin cable and have tried the jumper settings as master and cable select and with it on the middle and the end connector but when it is connected to the ide1 socket on the mobo I get the "disk Failure" message when I try to boot. It used to work fine connected to the ide1 channel but not anymore. The only way it will now boot up is with it connected to the secondary (ide2) channel.
When it is connected to the ide1 channel the bios still recognizes the hd but it won't boot into windows.
I'm thimking maybe something to do with the mbr being damaged but that is new territory for me.

 

[Blujacket]

You can rebuild/replace the Master Boot Record on Win9x/ME by booting to a boot disk for your version and at the A: prompt type: fdisk /mbr and press Enter.

 

[sportysk]

I have tried the fdisk /mbr but when I do it while connected to ide1 it says that mbr was NOT updated, but it works when I am connected to ide2 but it still doesn't boot when connected to ide1. The only thing I didn't try is a low level format on this hard drive.

 

[khamrick]

sportysk,
Did you ever find out what caused your IDE1 not to be recognized at boot time? I have the same problem on an eMachine running WinXP Home. It happened out of the blue one time when I was booting - came up with "Operating System Not Found" message. I had not done any changes before this happened, so it looks like a hardware problem with the IDE1 controller. I finally gave up and put my bootable operating systems on the IDE2 controller. After it boots, everything (including hard drives) on the IDE1 controller is accessable, just not seen during boot process. I assumed it was a motherboard hardware problem, but if you found out something else, please let me know.

 

[micker377]

What is your "boot order" in BIOS? Your "boot" drive should be IDE 0. I bring this up because I had a problem with a system last week that really threw me. The boot order choice (in BIOS) was : Floppy - IDE 0 - Zipdisk - CD - IDE 1 - IDE 2. When setting this up, I kept going backwards through the choices. I'd see IDE 2, and then IDE 1, and then CD so I kept choosing IDE 1. Needless to say, this didn't work!