PC won't boot with second HD

[Andy A]

PC will boot fine with just my windows hard drive plugged in, but as soon as I plug my second SATA HD in, it gets to the windows loading screen, then goes black, and goes no further, any ideas??

Changed the cable, so thats not it, there are only documents and stuff on the second drive

 

[W17GLE]

have you got them both set as master? i know when i used to build computers there was settings on th hard drive for slave and master. don't know if they are stilll the same not bothered with computers for about five yeaars now.worth a try

 

[Dink]

check the boot order in bios with both drives in place and connected

 

[Swish]

SATA drives don’t have jumper settings. As the pc boots windows but then hangs I don’t think it can be the bios but you may finding a setting to do with sata ide emulation or something along those lines. Windows may be hanging because it’s looking for sata drivers for your motherboard, check the manufacturers website.

 

[alexbleubolt]

can you plug it in with the pc on, just the sata lead, when windows is loaded, so it intitialises it

 

[Andy A]

Plugging it in when it is on does work, but it crashes shortly after.

Its really weird, the PC has been fine for two years, now decided to act up.

Boot order is fine, could there possibly be something on the drive that would cause windows to recognise it as a problem??

 

[fizzy_drink]

My SATA drive runs off it's own "raid" type controller (built into the motherboard), so:

1) It has a seperate BIOS to setup - have a close look when booting up, and see if anything comes-up regarding SATA or RAID, and see what settings you can play with.

2) XP might not recognise the drive unless SATA drivers are installed. Perhaps installing them before you connect the drive might help too (Although theoretically it shouldn't make a difference, but it might be getting stuck whilst detecting the drive?).

3) When I installed my SATA drive, I had to play with the jumper settings on my IDE drive in order for them to work together properly... it took the best part of a day to figure out!

 

[Andy A]

there shouldn't be any settings that are incorrect, my bios hasn't been altered at all, I don't change it because i'd forget my overclock settings as my new board doesn't have profiles to save to.

There are only SATA drives installed, so no IDE drives to worry about

It detects the drive fine, the windows loading scrren pops up (where the blue bar scrolls accross) then the hard drive reads, the goes to black screen and nothing further happens

 

[fizzy_drink]

there shouldn't be any settings that are incorrect, my bios hasn't been altered at all, I don't change it because i'd forget my overclock settings as my new board doesn't have profiles to save to.

There are only SATA drives installed, so no IDE drives to worry about

It detects the drive fine, the windows loading scrren pops up (where the blue bar scrolls accross) then the hard drive reads, the goes to black screen and nothing further happens

AH!

Sorry, I misunderstood.

Do you have access to a CDRW? If so, I can send you a boot disc image, which you can use to have full acccess to your files.

You might just have some dodgy files or something.