Computer Problem

[jambutty]

Earlier today I replace my secondary hard drive with my daughter’s secondary hard drive from her dead computer in an attempt to salvage her personal data on it, leaving my primary HD in place.

Nothing happened. My computer refused to boot up.

All I got was:
Verifying DMI Pool Data
Boot from CD:
Boot from CD:
Error loading OS

So I removed her HD and replaced my own and got exactly the same. Oooops! What’s gone wrong?

Hitting L Ctrl – L Alt and Delete and pressing F12 I eventually arrived at the Boot Menu with three choices:
Floppy
+ Hard Drive
CD Rom

Choosing Hard Drive I was presented with a menu listing the two hard drives in situ:
CH0 M :
CH0 S :

Choosing CH0 M: the computer booted up with everything on it working as it should and access to the secondary Hard Drive.

A System Restore didn’t cure the problem and System Mechanic didn’t find anything wrong. Overall Health and Security are at the highest level. All my various anti-nasties do not report any problems. In fact to all intents and purpose there is nothing wrong with my computer except that it won’t boot up unless I go through the above routine.

My BIOS boot sequence is Floppy – CD – HD as it has been for ages.

My computer will boot up on the Lynux CD and other bootable CD’s OK and also from a floppy, it just doesn’t want to know the HD unless I go through the above routine.

Any ideas?

I run Windows XP upgraded from ME.

[entwisi]

check the jumper settings on the disk, make sure one isn't accidentally set to cable select. then set it to boot from HD first in teh bios, why wait till its checked floppy and CDs when you want it to boot from HD 99.99% of times.

[jambutty]

Jumper settings don’t alter themselves, accidentally or otherwise. It was a simple exchange of slave hard drives. But I thought that I had explained that.

After replacing my slave with my daughter’s slave my computer refused to boot up in the normal manner. When I put my slave HD back it was the same story. Ergo by connecting my daughter’s slave HD it did something to my computer and I’m trying to find out what so that it can be corrected.

I can afford to wait the extra few milliseconds that it takes to boot up because the system checks my floppy drive and CD drives so why not. It comes in handy on other occasions. In any case I already tried making HD the first port of call as it were, to no effect.

Any ideas?

[entwisi]

The reason I asked about jumpers is that her 'slave' could have been set to cable select, depending on how the internels of your pc are wired this could mean that you endeded up with two 'masters' on one ide channel. The fact that the output that you posted does not even show it trying IDE0 ( or CH0 as your PC likes to call it) is typical of two HDs fighting the BIOS to be 'master'. At this point depending on teh BIOS it may have now got its knickers in a twist and be usure of which drive is teh true master, by forcing teh selection in boot menu you remove that confusion.

You could try doing autodetect on teh hard disks and make sure during boot that it identifies them properly in teh correct order(most POST screens show teh make/model number of teh HDs, if these show up as 'corrupt' text then try unplugging teh slave and starting with just master, if this then works fine you know that there is a resource confict.


PS, to check Floppy and CD for boot sectors takes few thousand milliseconds and you can always make the change for the odd time you need it. it will also protect you should someone leave an infected disc in either drive.

[jambutty]

Actually the whole point is academic now because last night I sorted it.

Working on the principle that it does no harm to look I went back into the Advanced Bios Features and started to check every setting to see if anything stood out as unusual.

In the Hard Disk Boot Priority section it listed the two hard drives with CH0 S: at the top of the list. Without any actual knowledge it didn’t seem right to me so I brought CH0 M: to the top and voila all was well.

How it came to be changed is a complete mystery but I don’t propose to try and figure it out other than when I connect the other slave the priority order gets changed.

So thanks for trying.