New HD only works as "D:"

[Pariah69]

I received a Maxtor 250 GB ATA 133. Used Ghost 8 (and subsequently, Maxblast with the same results) to copy my existing boot drive C: to it. Set it up as the master on Primary IDE, with the original C: drive as slave... no problems in BIOS. My motherboard is ATA133 capable, and I am using an 80-wire cable.

I have an XP SP1 system, with a multiboot menu that can boot from either fixed disk. So here's the odd thing... if I boot to the XP installation with the new drive as C:, startup hangs with a fleeting BSOD that I can't read. If I boot to the old drive as C:, everything's fine, and I can read the new disk as D: with no problems. Using the multiboot menu, I can even boot XP from the new disk, as long as XP doesn't think it's C:! This one is driving me nuts... any help is appreciated.

 

[smah]

After you copy the old drive to the new, unplug the old drive. Then boot windows to get the new drive registered as C: Once everything is working as expected, then reconnect your old drive.

 

[Pariah69]

smah... I've tried that. I get to the Windows XP screen (light-blue with the MS flag logo), and it hangs. No BSOD, just completely frozen.

The odd thing is, even when it's the only drive connected, I get the scandisk screen, saying that Windows needs to check drive D: for integrity. And it does, and it passes... then it hangs at the aforementioned screen. So for some reason, Windows only wants to use this drive as a D: drive, and I cannot understand why.

 

[ski]

You did remember to jumper the Maxtor 250 GB HD as Master and the other HD as Slave, and also reconnect them to the correct locations on the IDE cable(Master on the end connection, Slave on the middle connection), right?

 

[wolluf]

Pariah69 - are you sure you've done what Smah suggested? You'd need to start again - clone the old drive to the new and then disconnect the old one before rebooting machine (you should also make new one primary master of course - but that shouldn't matter if its the only drive in the machine). That's the crucial bit - otherwise the old drive will be detected as C:.

If the new drive is only drive in machine and old drive was running XP on C:, then if it won't run now, you've got some other problem (you mobo does support 250GB drive? XP is at SP1? - pre-SP1 no support for partitions > 128 (or 137 depending how measured) drives - see

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

 

[Pariah69]

Inspired by a similar thread, I disabled the UltraDMA mode for the drive... lo and behold, it booted up as the system C: drive. I have no idea why I can't use UltraDMA and still boot off the drive. Note that I can enable UltraDMA on the drive, and everything's fine, as long as it's the D: drive (even if it's my system drive, just as long as my boot sector is on C:!!!)

Although this solution works, I'm not happy with it. XP reports that the current transfer mode is "Multi-Word DMA Mode 2" rather that DMA 6, which it should be. Anybody have any suggestions?

 

[Pariah69]

The system is proving very unstable. I found I could reboot with UltraDMA enabled, and get my 250 GB drive as C: in DMA Mode 6. But I could only do it once. Upon reboot with only the new disk installed, I got the dreaded "disk read error occurred".

I think the issue is linked to the filesystem. The only difference between the original drive and the new drive is that the new drive is formatted NTFS. I can boot successfully every time as long as my boot sector is on the original FAT32 drive, but if my boot sector is on the NTFS drive, I get all kinds of bad behavior.

 

[wolluf]

Have you run Maxtor's diagnostic utility (Powermax) on the drive?

Have you tried a clean install of XP on the new drive on its own in the machine? (just to see how that performs?)

As you made no mention of drive limits I mentioned for mobo & XP, I'm presuming 250GB drive is fully supported by your hardware (bios) and software (XP).