Why is it booting off Slave?

[Amonte]

I have my main (primary master) drive that loads up Win2000. Then I put in my other drive (primary slave)that has Win98, well not really, it was formatted by maxblaster and has a few win98 files in it so when it boots it flashes up then goes to C:

Anyway, bios reads the drives correctly as master and slave, but it tries to boot up off the slave drive. It somehow makes the slave drive C: and the master as D: after the weird boot. Why?

Do I have to put the master drive on the inner connector of the IDE cable? That's the only explanation I can think of, since bios recognized ok, but after loading they are reversed. hmmm

Thnx peoples!

:tongue: <font color=red>"Never pick a fight with an ugly person .. they have nothing to lose" </font color=red> :tongue:

 

[jc14all]

It could be that the partition on the HDD formatted by maxblaster is not set to active, or your cable configuration is incorrect, or the jumpers (master/slave) on your HDD's are incorrect.

JC-------<*){{{>{~~~~~
Fisher of men

 

[Amonte]

Well the second drive can boot up fine by itself, it goes into prompt because I didn't install windows on it yet.
The slave drive is set right now as cable select, but it was on slave I believe as well and had the same results.

Does the position on the IDE cable matter? (I'd rather not pull out the HD's and everything else just to find out)

:tongue: <font color=red>"Never pick a fight with an ugly person .. they have nothing to lose" </font color=red> :tongue:

 

[jc14all]

Your Master boot HDD should be the first connection from the M/B, and the slave should be at the end of the ribbon cable.

JC-------<*){{{>{~~~~~
Fisher of men

 

[Lars_Coleman]

Not with cable select. He has it right. Most cable select cables have a blue connector, grey, and black. The blue to the motherboard, the grey to slave, and the black to master. You just need to make sure that you have all those set correct. You might as well use jumper select and just set them as master and slave instead of cable select. That way the jumpers are going to rule out your problem.

The biggest thing is that you want to check fdisk to make sure the active partition is set to the correct one. You should be able to specify that. Also check your boot sequence in the BIOS. Some give you the option of booting to any hard drive connected to the motherboard.

<font color=red>BIOS updates do wonders ....</font color=red>

 

[Amonte]

Ok I swapped the drives and then I went into bios and told it to boot off "HDD-0". That seemed to do the trick.

BUT, now it loads up and then after about a minute or so it will automatically reboot by itself!!

I have disconnected the second drive (the slave) and the computer is still stable, so what could the second drive be doing to cause this?

:tongue: <font color=red>"Never pick a fight with an ugly person .. they have nothing to lose" </font color=red> :tongue: