Win2k server wont' boot unless it's on secondary master

[kinji5]

Hello

I have win2k setup on my dell 8500.. it was running fine until today it decided to freeze up.. upon reboot it wont' load into windows, luckily i have a 3 week old backup image drive. i was just going to hook up the backup as primary master and the corrupt drive as secondary master: both were on cable select: but upon rebooting it loaded from the (so thought) corrupted drive and everything works fine... but when i got back to put the drive on primary master it wont' boot again... i tried removing all the harddrive drivers to let it redetect but it does the same thing... i tried setting the jumpers to master and slave respectively .. but it won't work either.. only on secondary master with the other drive on primary master will the OS load... is it something with the bios?
Thanks...

 

[wolluf]

Have you checked in the bios (if second hard drive is first boot device - that would explain your it working with backup drive as secondary master.

Must admit got confused - why mention cable select if both drives on separate IDE connections? And then what was the master/slave setup - if again you're using separate connections. Do you mean primary and secondary master (ie, separate cables)?

 

[kinji5]

First off, I like to thank you for posting:

Bios: i checked to see that it is booting from HD but it only has the option to boot "Harddrive C:"

So... they are both C: because they are an image of each other: but it still should boot from the Pimary Master.

To clearify I have two drives both 40gigs one is Westerndigitial (WD) the other is Maxtor (Mx). The original is the WD drive and it was running fine until it decide to quit. so i hooked up the Mx drive to Primary Master and the WD to Secondary Master. The machine then booted up fine.. however i found that the drive that it was booting from was the WD drive... so i shutdown and disconnected the WD drive and reboot.. it wont' boot anymore... so i change the jumpers to cable select and it still will not boot from the Mx drive..

so.. i am stuck. any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. thanks

 

[kinji5]

I got it resolved by booting into safemode and then removing all the hd drivers... seems to do the trick.. oh well thanks for your reply!