Langos

Hi!

I just got a second harddrive. It's a Samsung SpinPoint P120S 250GB SATA2, my motherboard is a MSI K8N Neo2 54G with a AMD 64 3500+ and a gig of TwinMos 3200 ram. My main harddrive is a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB SATA2 which works fine. Now to the problem;

When I plug in the Samsung drive the PC starts booting but never gets past the "Detecting IDE drives" screen. It's not frozen cause I can still access the BIOS. If I unplug the SATA cable and then start windows it works just fine, I was even so bold that I tried connecting the SATA cable after booting windows which makes the computer slow down for a while and then the drive is visible under "My Computer". Next time I boot it's the same problem all over again, it wont start up. I've even tried the jumper that comes with the HDD that limits the transfer capacity from 3 to 1.5 Gb/s. Starting the computer in failsafe mode indicates that the HDD is there and functional but windows just wont boot in normal mode.

I am all out of ideas, any suggestions are much appreciated.

Tumbleweed36

Hi,

Do you have any ide drives on the system?

Second thing, many of the newer boards (don't know yours) have a hard drive priority setting so make sure you booting Hard drive (want you wnat to have boot) is listed first there. Then, set your boot order to:

CDRom - 1st
Floppy - 2nd
Sata - 3rd - One you want to boot from

Don't forget to save before you exit.

It almost sounds like you have your Raid feature turned on. If not using Raid, then go into the BIOS setup menu and set it to Disabled.

Post back after taking a read and doing a test run.

blackduck30

I would have to agree with tumbleweed that it sounds like a boot priority issue.
If you have both drives plugged into the same controller that would eliminate the raid but if not that would also be a good thing to check.

Langos

Hi again!

Yes, I have 2 IDE units;
DVD/CD, Location: Bus Number 0, Target ID 0, LUN 0
CD/burner, Location: 1 (Secondary ATA Channel)

My main HDD is currently at Location: 0 (Primary ATA Channel).

I dont have a floppy but I'll try the boot order you suggested Tumbleweed36 and report back. Thanks!!

edit:

I've changed the boot device order to CD-ROM/Floppy/Hard-Drive (Cant chose SATA) and then under another menu I can set the boot order of the hard drives. I didn't have the SpinPoint plugged in so Im going to shut down and plugg it in and make sure it's on the second place in the list and hope that it works..

2nd edit:

It did what it done all along, it got to the Windows logo with the moving loading bar where it froze with a faded logo. As I was sitting there wondering what to do next it all of a sudden keept on loading Windows. Maybe I've been way to impatient and not waited long enough for it to load or the boot order change worked, I think it's the latter. Thanks a millione for your help guys!

blackduck30

glad to hear you got it sorted