"John" said in news:FiD%b.10213$UU.7111@lakeread01:
I have a weird boot problem. I have 2 hard drives. And I have
verified the jumper settings and they are correct.

If I have just one hard drive connected, it boots fine.

If I have two hard drives conneted at the same time it doesnt boot.
It gives a disk boot error.

Now the strange part. If I have a bootable cd in the cd rom but it
does not boot from it, it will boot from my hd with out any problems.

Any idea on what could be causing this?

Thanks!

Some things to check (don't know if all apply to your problem):

- If using ATA-66 or faster hard drives, are you using an 80-wire/40-pin
cable to connect them, or are you using an older 40-wire/40-pin cable? The
CD-ROM drive can still use the old 40-wire/40-pin cable since it goes only
to ATA-33, but you'll need to use the 80-wire/40-pin cables for
ATA-66/100/133 hard drives.

- If you are jumpering the hard drives to be master or slave, are you using
a ribbon cable that does NOT have a tiny piece of wire (I think it is for
signal line #34) punched out? If you look close to the end connector on the
cable (I think it's at the end you connect to the motherboard), see if there
is a 1/4" section or so of the ribbon cable that looks like it has been
punched out (so a small piece of the wire for that signal line is gone). If
so, you are using a cable-select ribbon cable and need to configure your
hard drives to use cable select rather than use the master/slave settings.
I prefer to manually configure the master/slave relationship of my drives so
I don't use cable-select ribbon cables. For pre-fab computers built in an
assembly line, they don't want to waste time figuring out how to jumper the
drives so they leave them all configured for cable select and then use a
cable-select modified ribbon cable.

- Or, do you want to use cable select (which means ALL drives whether for
hard drives or CD-type drives are configured to use cable select AND you use
a cable-select cable)? If so, are the hard drives from the same
manufacturer? I've had problems in the past (but not recently) where even
using a master/slave setup with a Western Digital as master and with a
Seagate as slave wouldn't work. IDE means integrated device electronics
(i.e., the drive controller has been moved onto the drive). The master
drive has to wait until it gets a signal from the slave that the slave is
ready and then reports itself (and slave) as ready to the system. If the
controllers don't communicate well, then you find a mix of brands of hard
drives don't work well together. The only solution (other than wasting
money to buy same-brand drives) is to attach the hard drives to different
channels. Connect one hard drive (as master) to the first IDE port (IDE0)
and the other hard drive (also as master) to the second IDE port (IDE1).
Then both are master drives with no slave and their controllers don't have
to be 100% compatibile with each other (and hopefully a CD-type drive is
compatible with whatever hard drive is shared on the same IDE channel). So
whether you use cable select or master/slave, it might help to put the 2
drives on separate IDE ports.

- You mentioned they are jumpered correctly and yet you still have a problem
using them so, to us, there's a good chance they are not jumpered correctly.
You have 2 hard drives and 1 (?) CD-type drive. Are they all connected to
the motherboard's IDE ports? Do some go to an IDE controller expansion
card? One configuration would be to have the boot hard drive as master on
IDE0 (and the only drive on that IDE channel) and on IDE1 you have the other
hard drive as master and the CD-type drive as slave. But other
configurations are possible. What do you have?

- I don't know why having a bootable CD in the CD-type drive (but from which
you do NOT boot) would "fix" the problem. But then I still don't know which
hard drives are configured as master/slave or cable select, what type of
ribbon cables you are using, and onto which IDE ports the hard drives and
CD-type drive are connected.

- Could be something in your BIOS setup. Is the drive detection configured
to Auto? What's the boot sequence for which drives in what order are used
for booting the system? Have you tried to clear the CMOS table (a copy of
the BIOS) in case it got corrupted? I have seen where the CMOS copy of BIOS
got corrupted and caused severe problems with the computer. Sometimes a CRC
error gets reported but I've also seen where there was no error and clearing
the CMOS (to force a new copy of the BIOS settings get written to it) would
fix the problem. Remember to record any customized settings before clearing
CMOS.

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