lloydking

Hello,

I recenlty had a HDD failure thats forced me to look to alternatives.
This was my setup prior to the failure
1) IDE DVD drive (Samsung)
2) SATA Seagate 500 gig drive

One fine day, there's no boot activity, I run windows setup and it finds no hard disks installed. So I removed the SATA drive and had it checked on a friend's system. The drive wasn't reading there either. So that will take some time to get sorted out as it is under warranty.

Here's the strange issue. I bought a SATA DVD drive (as my previous one was having issues and was quite old) and setup an older HDD (10 GB) for temporary use.
New setup
1) SATA DVD Drive
2) IDE Samsung 10 gig drive
I know the 10 gig drive has no issues as I was using it as an external drive for quite some time.
I can't enable this drive to be the primary drive as I don't have the Chip Select thingy at the back. Therefore, the BIOS shows the HDD as primary slave.

I install XP and the initial setup runs smoothly, it detects the hard drive and proceeds to copy the setup files. After this step, XP setup should reboot and start installing XP (device configuration, registry, etc). However, when setup reboots, there is no activity. IF I press F8 before the boot starts, I get the normal options:
Start Windows normally, in safe mode, last known good configuration, etc. However choosing any of these options, leaves my screen blank and the HDD light constantly running.

I initially thought this could be some issue with the motherboard, but I was able to install Ubuntu OS successfully (and posting this thread from there).

Are there any known issues of Windows XP unable to boot from primary slave?
(I've tried changing IDE and SATA cables, but with no result)

Perhaps someone whose adventerous enough can remove the chip select pin from their primary master HDD (while removing the power cables from the other IDE HDD if any, so that they aren't detected as slaves too) and check if the boot up still occurs ?