SATA drive prevents windows from booting

[sephy2006]

I'm currently running winxp on a IDE drive, and I recently put in a SATA drive(non-raid) for extra file storage. Up 'til now it was working fine, but all of a sudden if I have the SATA drive plugged in when starting the computer, windows xp just wont boot(it gets stuck at the blue scrolling bar screen). Everything in the bios looks fine; it's detecting the sata drive, and it's still booting from the ide drive. The only change I made to the sata drive before it stopped working was installing the game Prey.

What I really don't understand is how could the sata hdd affect winxp on the ide drive, when there are no drivers, nothing running at startup, nothing at all on the sata except some games, movies, and Firefox. Any help would be appreciated.

my rig is:
ASRock 939Dual-Sata2
AMD 3200+
1GB of PC3200
120GB Seagate(IDE)
320GB Seagate 7200.10 series(Sata)
Antec 350W PSU
Radeon X700 Pro

 

[Zoron]

Run diagnostics on the SATA drive to see if it's failing. A failing non-boot device can slow your computer to a crawl.

 

[sephy2006]

Run diagnostics on the SATA drive to see if it's failing. A failing non-boot device can slow your computer to a crawl.

Don't really know how to do that. Can you reccomend some software? Preferably free =p

 

[dmroeder]

From Segate

 

[sephy2006]

Thanks, I'll run that right after I kill C'thun

 

[sephy2006]

Thanks for the tips guys. Turns out there was an .ISO on the sata drive that Daemon tools was trying to mount at startup, booting into safe mode and unmounting it fixed it. No idea why an image would freak out the OS like that though.