when running multiple hard drives

N

n3kro

New Member
When your running multiple hard drives in your computer do they need to be set to anything in particular in the bios or anything? Right now I have 3 drives in my computer (a 75gb, 200gb, and 750gb..all western digital) and when trying to boot up my computer I'm getting a "failure to boot disk, please insert system disk and press enter" error. Now, this started happening before I installed my newest 750gb drive, and it even occurred when I only had my 1 original 250gb drive in there. Normally a format and reinstall of the operating system will fix this. However now the error won't go away. I did a complete format and fresh install of windows and got it booted back up, then when I restarted the computer I got the same error again not even 5 minutes after finishing the reinstall of windows. I actually posted in here last week some time and someone told me it might be an issue with the motherboard. I just wanted to post this and see if there might be some conflict with the way I have my drives set up in bios. I can't really see another way to set it up tho. Anyways, I have 2 SATA drives and 1 IDE drive. The IDE is set to IDE Master and the 2 SATA drives are set to SATA-MASTER 1 and SATA-MASTER 2.

Should this be set up differently?
 
You need to configure your boot priority in the BIOS. The drive w/ the OS should be first in the boot priority. Have you tried that yet?
 
That sucks. I used to get that error on my Sony Vaio sometimes. I'm not really sure. Try searching the forum. This problem comes up a lot.
 
The problem there seems simple enough if the sata controllers are enabled in the bios itself. If you are trying to install Windows on one of the sata drives like the first not the 750gb you probably have that set as the default drive. The problem is the Windows installer looks for the first drive especially IDE on the system. The boot information is then placed there.

With Vista on the one remaining ide drive here the XP installer decided to place the boot.ini and basic dos system files on that rather then the first of two sata models in use here. What happened with the first sata set as default? Nothing worked! The ide drive was then unplugged to see XP reinstalled as a stand alone OS on the first of the two sata drives(WD 500gb). When booting from the ide later Vista refused to load and teh automatic repair tools on the Vista installation disk took care of that fast.
 
You were right I think PC eye.

I ran the windows memory diagnostic just to try and do something and for some reason my computer actually started up at that point. I looked on my IDE drive (which now contains only programs and personal files) and sure enough, I have a boot file on there. BOOTSECT.BAK -- Would that be the windows boot file?

So I think if the problem persists and it doesn't boot back up this time, I'm going to do as you suggest and unplug my IDE drive and probably my other SATA drive for safe measure and install a clean copy of windows on it. Hopefully that will solve my problem. I feel like I'm taking a step in the right direction here though. Thanks a bunch! I'll post back here if this solves it, so future people with the same problem can reference it.
 
With the boot.ini file on the ide drive try setting that as the default boot device to see if Windows loads normally. You'll probably find that to be the case there. The other quick option is to simply unplug the ide drive and leave the sata as the default and boot up to the recovey console with the XP installation disk.

Once there simply type in the "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" commands to see that will see a working boot record placed on the sata drive where Windows was installed on. If all goes well that will save you the time there. At least you will already have the ide drive unplugged if a fresh copy of Windows is still needed.
 
Well I think what the issue was is my IDE drive is just on the verge of completely dying. I've been getting prompts to back it up over the past couple of days from vista and bios when booting up. So I think that's why my computer wouldn't boot up even though it was only one drive that had gone bad. It just had all the boot information on it. I'm going to try and format the IDE and see if I can salvage it or if it's just completely dead.

Using the vista repair tools did work on getting my boot info onto my sata drive though. So my computer is booting up just fine now. Thanks for your help :)
 
You'll love Vista over XP for that item! Instead of trying the recovery console commmands and still not getting anywhere in some cases MS finally threw in something that works. :P

Wiith the ide being worn and seemingly on the verge of going on you it would be wise to create a few fdlders on one of both of the sata drives to back things up from it. Eventually I will be tossing in one of the new WD GP 1tb drives for a storage drive to free the second 500gb sata model now used as a storage drive. Then I can tinker a little more with Linux or Solaris or... :D
 
Ya, I went out and bought vista the 3rd day it was out actually and I love it hehe. I was a little nervous getting it at first because everyone saying it was buggy and horrible but I haven't had any issues with it at all. So I don't know what everyone is talking about. Maybe they just don't have good enough systems to support it? Only thing I wish I would have done was buy the full version instead of going the cheap route and buying just the upgrade :( . Makes it kind of irritating when having to reformat.

Linux is fun to play with. I had it booting off an external drive for a while but had to get rid of it so I could use the external to back up all the data from my ide drive. Which I'm going to remove and replace with a 500gb drive sometime in the future maybe. Maybe I'll make a separate partition for Linux then too. It sure is fun to play around with :)
 
The one thing I plan out for any new build is expansion in the storage and backup dept.! The idea of a 1tb is interesting to me since I had pondered on setting up a pair of 750gb models in an array and said naaaaa.... I want two drives as two logical drives not a mirror.
 
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