Secondary Hard Drive Issues

[RSi Dave]

Ok, i install vista onto a new partition on my Master HDD yesterday.

Now during the install both my Primiary HDD and Secondary HDD where connected, now after it copied files over and restarted it went to load and started to hand on the "Verifying DMI Pool Data......." section.

I have since uplugged the Secondary HDD and it now boots into both XP and Vista fine however as soon as you plug it in again it hangs at this point. Ive also tested the Secondary HDD to see if its broken by only having that plugged in which doesnt have a OS on it and it gets past the "Verifying DMI Pool Data......." section but brings the error up of no Boot Device.

Anyway both drives are working but dont like to work with each other plugged in, this ever happened to anyone else?

Ive got a couple of things to try once i go get a PS2 keyboard which involves either uplugging both drives, setting the drive info in the BIOS to none/not installed and then restarting. Then plugging them back in and updating the BIOS again, which in turn should update the DMI pool data. If this doesnt work i might have to boot into DOS and run the A:\sys c: command to copy a new system over.

 

[Andy]

Master boot record problem?

Is the secondary drive a SATA? If so it's hotswapable. Fire up the machine then connect the 2nd drive. As a long term solution, other then a reformat, I'm not sur how to resolve it though.

I'm probably wrong but it's just a thought.

 

[RSi Dave]

not a SATA!

So f**king annoying as its got all my documents and everything on that drive.

Was working yesterday fine aswell

 

[RSi Dave]

Since this morning ive formated and re-installed a new version of windows XP onto my HDD and now everything worked fine. however.....

I have also upgraded again to vista and yet again the secondary HDD wont work, so my guess is that Vista Boot INI or boot record is not designed to support dual HDD's which really is rubbish.

Anyone else had this problem?

 

[RobertCL]

Something to do with the settings of the Master/Slave jumpers on you harddrives? Maybe Vista is more "picky" than XP if they are wrong.

Otherwise try plugging one HDD into the 1st IDE controller and the other into the 2nd controller (assuming you have two...)

Or get something like Partition Magic and check that there is nothing "dodgy" about your secondary disk - sometimes it's spots errors in the partition tables when it starts up.

 

[Storm_Force]

No problem here m8, though I got winxp on 1st hd and vista on 2nd hd and the are sata.

 

[RSi Dave]

cant understand it, from what ive read Vista uses a different boot setup compared to XP i.e. no Boot.ini file

Which makes it difficult, but oh well im now back using XP. Got that annoying task for installing everything again