MBR?

[alm450]

First off, hello to everyone, great forum from a great site.
And now for the problem.
I recently put together a pc with an 80 gig HDD and decided to add an old maxtor 80 gig HDD in a standard ide config.
The problem is it's failing, so when I remove the HDD with no OS, my pc won't boot to xp, nor will it boot from cd.
When I put it back it boots perfect. I looked in disk management and both hdd's are set as MBR partition style.
I tried to re install XP but it says there are no hard drive present F3 to quit.
This stupid drive is driving me bonkers, it's listed as c, when it's supposed to be for storage,and is now tied to my other HDD to boot.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
alm

 

[Crashman]

What controller is your other drive on?

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Flinx]

Give this a quick read, maybe it will help.

<A HREF="http://www.mikeshardware.com/howtos/howto_connect_ide_hd.html" target="_new">http://www.mikeshardware.com/howtos/howto_connect_ide_hd.html</A>


The loving are the daring!

 

[grecai63]

Are the two drives detected in the BIOS? Try to detect it in the BIOS or set it to auto.
If you have win 98 or 95,try a boot disk, do an fdisk to see what this tells you about the hard disks.
Check your jumper settings.

 

[alm450]

All my cables are conected fine, it detects in the bios.
I am wondering how a boot record spreads over 2 drives?
If I was running RAID 0, I could understand, but I'm not running RAID.
I guess I will have to low level format my master

 

[Flinx]

An MBR resides on each disk. Part of the information in the MBR is some partition information so each HDD will have one.

MBR - The Master Boot Record, AKA the master boot sector, AKA the boot sector. The place on a hard drive where the BIOS can find (and load) the initial boot program, disk drive parameters, partition table parameters, and the master partition table. From the partition table, the active partition is discovered. The MBR is always located at cylinder 0, head 0, sector 1.

The BIOS will determine the boot order. The IDE controller designates the hard drives as MASTER and SLAVE. Tries to boot the MASTER. I don't think it will ever try to boot the SLAVE. But the slave can have a MBR. If I remember right, if no bootable OS is found on the PRIMARY MASTER it is looked for on the SECONDARY MASTER.

The loving are the daring!

 

[khha4113]

Which HD does contain these files in its root folder (boot.ini, NTDetect.com and NTLDR)?
My guess is the HD that you want to remove has Windows bootloader and its associated files (those 3 above files), so when you took it off your comp couldn't boot.

Good or Bad have no meaning at all, depends on what your point of view is.

 

[Codesmith]

Did you do anything odd, like boot to Windows from the old hard drive then from within windows run the windows XP installation to install XP on the new drive?