vista will not boot up all the way with 2 SATA drive

[cameron23]

Greetings all,

Im hoping someone could help out a newbie. This forum has been helpful with previous issues i had but could not find anything related to the issue i'm experiencing

I just installed vista home premium on my Dell XPS. Upgraded from XP. Everything went well during the install. I have 2 SATA drive that i used with previous XP version i had. During vista install i had one SATA drive plugged (internal). after the install completed i plugged in the second internal SATA drive, rebooted and noticed the PC will not boot all the way. I powered the PC in safe mode and noticed lt locks up at Windows\system32\driver\null.sys

I disconected SATA2 and it boot up fine with no issues. I reconnected SATA2, Went into bios config disabled SATA2 and it boots up with no issues.
SATA operation in bios is set to ON instead of "RAID auto detect/ATA"
is there a way to fix this issue? I don't want to reformat SATA2 since i have some critical data i need to access.

Thanks in advance

 

[notherdude]

Perhaps try the second drive on a different SATA port. Make sure it is not marked 'raid'.

 

[cameron23]

I knew it was something simple. I'm new to the SATA world, coming from IDE

That did it. Thanks muchos!

 

[tcollins]

I am having the exact same problem as mentioned in this original post.

I have placed my second SATA HDD (400 GB Wester Digital) into every other available SATA port and I get them same result. It starts the PC, recognises all HDDs in the BIOS, shows the vista loading logo and then goes blank and just humms there forever.

Only solution is to unplug the second SATA HDD and it loads fine.

I have also tried a different power cable to the drive as well as a new SATA cable, all with the same result.

 

[organix]

did you disable raid in your bios as notherdude mentioned or are you trying to run a raid array? raid is funny and will not allow you to boot if it doesn't detect the proper volume across arrays.

 

[lightningbrigade]

Oh God. Alright, I'm ripping this scab open one more time.

I have nearly the same issue as tcollins. Vista wont load with my second SATA drive plugged in. Screen goes blank.
My BIOS sees the second drive and so does Vista's install CD. I can even view the files on the drive with the Vista installer CD.
I have RAID disabled and am on AHCI.

Specs:

Windows Vista Home Premium x64 Service Pack 1 (Service pack 2 being downloaded at the time of this writing)
HDD1: WD 150GB SATAII VelociRaptor
HDD2: WD 500GB SATA II WD5000AAJS-22TKA0 -removed from a MyBook external hard drive
MOBO: Asrock P45TurboTwins2000
RAM: 4GB DDR3
VIDEO: NVIDIA 9800 GTX+

Any ideas?

 

[lightningbrigade]

I fixed my own bs of a problem.

I ran "error-check" on the Vista install CD via file browser on my 500GB and I believe that fixed the problem.