NTLDR is missing error with ide drive

[RBM]

I have a P4C800-ED running XP. I have two 80 GB Seagate SATA hard drives as
a raid mirror on the promise controller and another 80GB Seagate SATA drive
as a backup on channel 4. All has been working fine. I installed a removable
hard drive tray with an ide 10 GB drive. If I attempt to turn off or
disconnect the removable Drive, upon reboot I get the NTLDR is missing and
XP won't load. I press Ctl-Alt-Del, go into bios and find my boot drive is
no longer listed in the boot sector, I replace it boot up and all is fine as
long as I leave the removable drive connected. Thanks for any ideas and help
RBM

 

[Ryan]

I have a P4C800-ED running XP. I have two 80 GB Seagate SATA hard drives as
a raid mirror on the promise controller and another 80GB Seagate SATA drive
as a backup on channel 4. All has been working fine. I installed a removable
hard drive tray with an ide 10 GB drive. If I attempt to turn off or
disconnect the removable Drive, upon reboot I get the NTLDR is missing and
XP won't load. I press Ctl-Alt-Del, go into bios and find my boot drive is
no longer listed in the boot sector, I replace it boot up and all is fine as
long as I leave the removable drive connected. Thanks for any ideas and help
RBM

What are all the drives set to on that chain, master, slave, cable select.

I would have the chain with the removable drive to CS.

Ryan

 

[Roger Hamlett]

I have a P4C800-ED running XP. I have two 80 GB Seagate SATA hard drives
as a raid mirror on the promise controller and another 80GB Seagate SATA
drive as a backup on channel 4. All has been working fine. I installed a
removable hard drive tray with an ide 10 GB drive. If I attempt to turn
off or disconnect the removable Drive, upon reboot I get the NTLDR is
missing and XP won't load. I press Ctl-Alt-Del, go into bios and find my
boot drive is no longer listed in the boot sector, I replace it boot up
and all is fine as long as I leave the removable drive connected. Thanks
for any ideas and help RBM

The same thing happens on a lot of boards with USB removable media. No
matter that you set the USB as the lowest priority device to boot from, if
you remove the disk, reboot, insert the disk, and reboot again, the BIOS
insists on making the 'new' device the boot drive.
It applies to several other Asus boards as well.
My own solution, was simply to put the NT boot stuff 'onto' the removable
disk, but with boot.ini, pointing to the SATA drives. The cost is a very
few kB on the disk, but freedom from the problem...

Best Wishes

 

[RBM]

There is a DVD-RW set to master and the hard drive set to slave