Windows won't load when adding 2nd HD.

Ok, I installed 2nd HD as a slave - and all worked fine. Its been in for about a month absolutly no problems.

But this morning when i power'd on, XP gets to the blue loading bar thing and just sits there. Doesnt freeze and no error mss, the bar just keeps going around and around. So i started it in Safe Mode - all works fine. Went back to normal startup - didnt work again same prob as before.

So i took out my 2nd HD and everything works fine. Put it back in, doesnt [/B]work..

So it seems i only get a problem when i have my 2nd HD attached and try to load windows normally, safe mode works.

Any ideas?

If you have set the 2nd drive's jumper to the slave position(or didn't?) you could try the cable select position to see if that clears this up. I've seen that often on multiple drive systems where somehow a hardware conflict comes up. Hopefully the drive isn't the problem there. Try the cable select setting to see if that corrects this.

Doesn't sound like this could be a problem, but always make sure that you have the proper drive selected in bios as the primary hard drive.

Everything is as it should be in my BIOS.

Explain this cable select thing...i have my secondary HD connected to the grey connector on my IDE which is the slave connector. (the other one for the pirmary is black)

The end of the primary ide cable is for the host drive(master) with the middle connector most often used for either a second hard drive or cd rom drive. With a single partition on each of two hard drives the slave drive will appear as the "D" drive while host boot drive appears as the "C". The jumper on a drive is a small plastic cap that slides down onto two pins at the rear of a drive's casing on most ide type drives. Hard drives, cd roms, cd and dvd burners all have this type of jumper.

The master setting is usually the "MA" marking on the casing while the "SA" or "SL" is the slave position. The cable selection position is "CA" or "CS" depending on make and model. If your second drive is set wrong(master) on the center connector Windows would stall during it's own hardware detection process while loading. If you still see problems with the jumper moved to the slave(SA) position the next thing to try would the cable select(CA or CS) position to see if problem is corrected. If these setting changes fail that would suggest the drive has developed a fault. The best advice here is to try the different jumper positions.

Tried all combinations...still no luckk

With two drives installed you may have to set both to the cable select position. I've seen this a few times when running multiple drives. Your mention of trying all combinations suggests you may have already tried this too. Trying a different cable to see if that is the problem or the new drive has developed a fault. You would want to keep the bios set to drive #0 or #1 depending on what is seen there for the primary drive.

If it works in safe mode and not in normal mode that means you have a driver problem. The driver will be the one related to your HDD controller. Uninstall it and reinstall it in safe mode and see what happens.

To uninstall that you would have to go into the device manager and right click on the drive seen there and the choose the uninstall option. But either a bad connector on the ide cable or using the right jumper settings is the usual cause for seeing this unless your boot sector was effected by something else.

can i say make sure nothing is trying to boot from the second hard drive when you load windows, as this cwill slow the computers loading time,

make sure, and he'll have a go at me for this (#6), try changing the second HDD to a slave on another IDE cable

If Windows was installed to the primary after the second drive was installed with a working OS(98, ME, 2000, even XP without SP or SP1) already on it XP would add that into it's own boot loader(boot.ini file) and prompt to choose to load either from the host installation or the second drive. When adding a drive after Windows is installed to the host drive the loader remains unchanged. The boot order in the bios would then determine which drive is booted from.

If you slave the cd rom to the primary drive if only one optical drive is installed you could then master the 2nd drive on the secondary to see if that solves the configuration problem. You may have to reformat the new drive with the Disk Management utility in the Adminstrative Tools to further get results there. You would then simply use that for a storage drive.