[banjomike]

In december something went wrong with the registry in my pc. I tried lots of things including replacing the apparently corrupted files with backups. Nothing worked. I gave up, bought a new hard drive and installed XP on it from scratch. I hooked up my old HD so I could access data from it. This left me with a small problem. Before the PC died on me I had 2 HDs. One for the OS and programs mostly, and the other for media files mostly.

Today I decided I wanted to finally be able to access that old data/media hard drive. So I opened the case. I took out my old non-operative DVD player drive. I left my new primary hard drive and the old primary HD hooked up as before. I attached the old data/media hard drive to the drive cable that was shared with my DVD burner. I set the jumpers so the HD would be the master and the DVD burner would be the slave.

When I booted it up, it failed to recognize any of the drives. So I disconnected the ATA cable that had the DVD drive and the media/data drive. Rebooted. Nothing. I changed the jumpers on my two hard drives so they were in cable select position. Now when I boot it recognizes both of them as 137439MB drives but it wont boot from either one. It takes me to the boot selection screen, you know do I want to boot into safe mode etc. No matter what I choose it reboots after my selection.

I'm totally baffled.

[win2kpro]

The machine is seeing two bootable drives. If you want to get data off the old hard drive set the jumper on the old hard drive to slave and put it in the 2nd position (the slave position) on the IDE cable where the optical drive was located.

If you set everything correctly the new hard drive should be set as master on one IDE channel with nothing connected in the slave position, and the old drive should be jumpered as slave on the other IDE channel with nothing connected in the master position. You can also set the drives up as cable select, but for simplicity and transferring data it is better to set up as master and slave on different IDE channels.

The machine should then boot from the new drive, and you should see you old drive as the slave and be able to transfer the data.

[banjomike]

Actually I have tried just hooking one hard drive up at a time, and it still goes into the safe mode screen, and then reboots.

[win2kpro]

I'm missing something here. After you installed Windows on the new hard drive did everything work properly?

[banjomike]

yes for over a month. It wasn't until I tried to hook up the third hard drive that I started having this problem. I wonder if my handling teh drive damaged it. Or if I've damaged the cable. At this point I'd be pleased if I could get it to boot at all.

G'night, thanks for responding so quickly. I'll check again in the morning.

[win2kpro]

OK, I missed the point that there were 3 drives.

Please answer the following questions.

Is this machine a custom built or "mass produced" machine such as HP, Gateway, Dell, etc.?

If it is a "mass produced" machine what is the EXACT make and model?

If it is a custom built machine what is the EXACT make and model of the motherboard?

What operating system are you using? Is the operating system media Retail, OEM or is it system builder media (recovery media)?

What is the EXACT make and model of the new hard drive you purchased?

I believe to begin with you need to remove the two older drives and concentrate on the new drive. With the new drive installed as the only drive with Windows installed on it it, will it boot? If not, I would reinstall Windows on that drive, and get Windows working properly with just that single drive installed before trying to recover data from the other two drives.

[banjomike]

Sorry I thought I'd mentioned the motherboard. I built the POC back in 2001. It has a Tyan Tiger MP 2460 v1.03. The newest hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200AAJB.

I just tried with only the WD attached, no other hard or optical drives, and the same thing, it asks me if I want to boot to safe mode, and regardless of what I pick it reboots.


Right now it only has the WD HD installed, and I am booting from a
BartPE disk that I made when I had troubles a few months ago. This is very weird and scary. It makes it to the progress bard saying, "starting bartPE" then it reboots.

As an experiment I am disconnecting all hard drives and leaving only the optical drive connecrted. I'm booting to the BartPE disk and... the same thing. It reboots at he same point. This isn't a HD problem is it?

[banjomike]

new data point...

I just tried to boot to my windowsXP disk with only the optical drive and my primary (the WD) hd attached. It hangs when it gets to the message "Setup is starting windows." MY current theory is that the motherboard's IDE stuff is dying.

[Rich-M]

Yes I think the board has had it. Did you check the bios to be certain the right drive is being called for as boot drive?

[win2kpro]

The board may be dying, however I would download the Western Digital drive test utility and run a full test on the drive. In the past couple of years hard drives have had a high failure rate even relatively new drives.

One other thing to check is to take a bright light and check all the motherboard capacitors to make sure all are flat on top. None should have swollen or bulging tops, or be leaking a brownish looking fluid. Bad capacitors can cause all kinds of errors.

[banjomike]

no leaking or bulging capacitors. I did make sure that the bios was set to boot the the right drive.

How would I run the Western Digital drive test utility when the PC won't boot. Is it a bootable iso or something? I suppose I could take the drive to work, plug it in there and run the utility there?

I'll leave this open today, in case someone has some miracle cure, then I will mark it "solved." Thanks

[Rich-M]

Should make a bootable floppy disk or cd.

[banjomike]

Since my XP install disk wouldn't boot, and my BartPE disk wouldn't boot, and my HD wouldn't boot, I am concluding there is something wrong with the motherboard. I'm not happy, but I appreciate the input from each of you. Thanks.