No BOOT with second HDD atached

[TopHat2]

I have just installed Win ME on an old machine with 2 HDD's. ME is on the drive that the BIOS reports as the primary master. If only this one drive is attached, PC boots into ME, if I connect the second HDD the machine won't boot initally giving the foloing message on the initial screen:

“Pri Master HDD Error”

If I soft boot CTRL-ALT-DEL, in this situation the PC boots into ME.
----------------
If I remove the primary slave the machine boots (to ME).

If I remove the primary master the machine will boot to the primary slave (DOS).

The prim master is aprox 850MB FAT32, the slave 320MB FAT16, in BIOS the first boot device is set to flopy, second IDE-0.

I dont' know if this is a HDD isue, or BIOS, or somthing elce.

Spec:
Boot screen says;
AMIBIOS...11/26/97 S
Main Processor :Cx6x86 PR166+
Processor Clock :133MHz
Pri Master : 02.02.01 ST3850A
Pri Slave :F0INA10 H3342-A4
Sec Master :104 CRD-8240B

Other info;
RAM=32MB
BIOS ver=AMI 0505 15.07.95
chipset ALI M1531 TXpro,
Drive C: initally formated under win98 and the DOS system files installed,
"ver" command now reports ME version 4.90.3000,
Drive C: is aprox 850MB,
Drive D: 342MB,
CDROM installed,

I've been up all night trying to sort this,I can't understand what is going on, please help!

Regards, TopHat2.

P.S. This is not my machine, so don,t ask why I want ME on it.

 

[Comtech]

Fdisk the slave drive and DO NOT make the partition active. ME doesn't play well with other children...it won't allow two hard drives, both with active partitions, on the same machine. Thankyou Microsoft...NOT! Cheers,
Jim

http://members.cnx.net/reboot/

 

[JoaoTL]

Hi.

1st - i dont see any advantage to use FAT32 on a 850MB HDD, usualy bigger than 2GB.

2 - try to change the to PMaster: HDD850MB + CDR ** SMASTER: HDD342MB

3 - try the Bios Update

Replay
Best Regards

---
JoaoTL
NOSPAM_mail@jtl.co.pt

http://www.jtl.co.pt

http://www.jtl.co.pt/Access

 

[AlexeyGubin]

Check jumper settings. If there are two IDE channels, remove everything and set each drive on each own channel.
Remember that if you are using Western Digital drives, you must remove jumpers from it to run as a single device on the channel. ----
Wbr, Alex

http://z-a-recovery.narod.ru/

: ZAR - FAT16/32 data recovery tool.