Hello everyone. Hope someone can give me a clue as to what's happening. Here's my situation. I have a 10 gig and a 60 gig hard drive. The 10 gig use to be the primary drive but I removed It and made the 60 gig the master. By the way, the 60 gig is a used drive from another PC. The Weird thing is, the 60 gig will boot up to the point where you see the Windows XP welcome screen and then it just hangs. What's stranger still is that I can still move the mouse at that point which tells me that the system isn't frozen. Or so I think. And if that's not strange enough get this. I re-attach my old 10 gig and make it a slave to the 60 gig, run the CMOS setup so that it can find the additional drive, reboot and TA DA!! The system boots up completely. I'm able to both view and run programs from the 60 gig drive with no problem. But why the 60 gig won't boot up without the slave attached is a mystery to me. Does anyone have an idea as to what may be the problem? Oh yeah, I'm running Windows XP on both drives.


I've thought about removing the slave drive while the system is up and running to see what would happen but I'm afraid I might cause more harm than good. I really need some help here.? ?:-(

Hi there Anthony.

Did you set the jumper on the back of the 60gb HD to master and the 10gb to slave? And also try swapping the HD's around on the ide cable to see if that helps.




PS; DON'T unplug youre HD with the power on!!!

Thanks for getting back to me Joe5. Yes, I did check to see if the jumpers were set to the proper position on both drives. I even tried swapping the drives around on the cable but when I do that the PC doesn't recognize the 60 gig drive at all. I did notice something though in the CMOS. It only recognized the drive as a 30 gig instead of 60. Could this be the problem. I have the entire disk as the primary partition. Do you think shrinking the primary partition down from 60 to about 10 gigs would help?

Hmmm... i think either there is a bad sector the size of half youre disk or the jumper is set wrong.
Have a look in youre manuall to see if you didnt set it to "32gb clip configuration".