Unable to boot from harddrive 1

[stech1]

This is the goofiest issue Ive seen in a while -

Have a custom pc with xp home. The 2nd harrdrive was going bad and kept on having me do a scandisk when I Boot and the drive is unreadable inside windows.

I pulled the power from the back of the PC and then pulled the power and IDE from the bad drive. When I started the PC, it wouldnt boot - it would start out booting normally but before it gets to the windows splash screen, it just freezes on the black screen and does nothing. CTRL + ALT + DEL works so the whole machine is not locked up.

I noticed the good HD is a western digital so I changed the pin settings to single. Still No effect.

The BIOS recognizes the western Digital HD. I Then used windows xp cd to do a repair. The installation detected the previous xp installation and continued the repair as normal. However after the initial copying of files, the computer rebooted and was still unable to boot.

Does anyone have any ideas whats up. The machione can boot to cd and a drive with no problem - it just wont boot from primary master IDE.

TIA

 

[stech1]

I have since placed a new harddrive in and installed windows successfully and was able to boot to it. Does anyone have any idea what was the reason that we are unable to boot to the original drive?

TIA

 

[G0AOZ]

Doing a repair to the operating system in this way, doesn't put anything like the same strain on components as doing a full installation from scratch.

I'd first of all reset the BIOS back to defaults, check for suspect memory, then try changing the PSU, and lastly look for a motherboard issue.

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[ktmrandy]

I have had this problem before and it was caused by having 2 hard drives in the computer when windows is installed. Some of the boot information goes to the second hard drive remove that and the computer will no longer boot. I did not look into the problem furtherfor a real solution, I just make sure to load windows with only one hard drive connected then connect the second. I have not had any problems since.