Installed 2nd SATA hard drive and now can't boot windows XP

[saulat_99]

Hello,

I recently realized my 2 hard drives were out of date and I was running out of room so I ordered two WD 1TB 64MB 7200RPM SATA3 Hard Drive (WD1002FAEX). I installed windows xp and transferred all my data to one of them last night. Had no problems did the windows updates, installed my programs, and everything was going fine. I just installed the second hard drive today and the PC will not boot now, it gives me the message to boot from cd/dvd and will not proceed beyond this. The boot order is set correctly to the proper hard drive and I have tried manually selecting it from the boot menu. Can anyone help me out? I am not real sure what to do, thanks for any help!

 

[johnb35]

Seems the second hard drive is faulty providing you picked the correct first boot hard drive. Anytime you had a new drive some bios setups will make the new drive the first boot drive. Go into the bios and see if it detects the second hard drive. Check the drive in another system and if it doesn't get detected or fails to boot then you know the drive is faulty.

 

[saulat_99]

Well I tried taking the new hard drive out of the picture (Which is blank and I will refer to a B from now on). So A is is in there by itself with window on it, and my data. Could I install windows on hard drive B and copy over the data from hard drive A? What about a windows repair on A in case some files got corrupt? I have always had issues repairing XP and generally end up reformatiing. I thought I could just install the 2nd hard drive and not mess with any of the bios settings, I didn't see any options in there that I could really change that weren't already looking correct.

PS Both drives are being detected during the boot up process. It fails at verifying the DMI pool and says immediately after that disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter

 

[johnb35]

Then it seems as though the wrong hdd is set as first boot device. Double check the bios settings.

 

[saulat_99]

I think it is just failing to boot for some reason. I triple checked the hard drive boot order, tried booting both drives (since they are the same model), and removed each of them and tried booting without the other; same thing every time.

 

[saulat_99]

I could be wrong but I'm thinking maybe the PC is expecting certain hardware configuration and I changed it so it will not boot. I got this idea from doing some research but I'll have to learn how to use some of the recovery/repair tools. I do know how to reset CMOS so perhaps I will try that next.

 

[saulat_99]

Well, I installed windows on drive B last night as I went to bed and woke up to a successfully formatted drive. I can also see drive A so I think I am good now. I'll back up all my data and reformat drive A and hopefully that will be the end of my problems.

 

[saulat_99]

I was installing updates on this second hard drive and decided to see what I could do about the first drive that I had windows on. I am able to see it so I am running chkdisc on it now. I would like to make the second hard drive my primary however when I go into manage my computer and look at the drives (was going to format the first drive) it lists the first drive as system and the second drive as boot under status. Did I somehow make this second hard drive a XP boot drive for the first drive or something like that? The first drive is at sata 0 if that makes a difference.

 

[johnb35]

It's possible the boot files for the second install is on the other drive so if you disconnect it, the second install won't bootup because of missing files. You should always install windows with only one drive attached unless you do a dual boot setup.

 

[saulat_99]

Yeah, I thought I read something about that... I didn't expect it to cause such a problem however. I started completely over and am now operating smoothly. My only problem is that I couldn't get the primary drive to be assigned letter C. I will accept it now that process is complete, no way I am starting over again unless absolutely necessary. Thank you for the help and suggestions.