2nd sataII HDD in vista

[Guest]

I recently set up my system with vista home premium on a "western-digital
200gb sataII hdd". Everything went fine no problems at all. A few days ago i
bought a new HDD (exact same as above) exclusively for media (music/videos).
I opened disk management, formatted the new drive and everything was fine.
The problem began when i restarted, my pc now freezes at bios screen. So i
unplugged the drive and restarted. once my system restarted i plugged the 2nd
drive back in and nothing happened, so i went to device management refreshed
disk device and it appeared again, then went to disk management utility and
everything appeared fine. Restarted, and again it freezes at bios screen. So
this is where i am stuck.... can anyone help??

**p.s. when it freezes i am unable to open up bios display. i have to unplug
2nd drive and restart. but i am sure you can imagine.. the disk is not in
bios.

 

[Guest]

This kinda of BIOS "freezing" is common with new technologies. I had issues
with another generation of mother boards that would freeze the BIOS if I had
a USB memory stick plugged in with a bootable sector. When it was trying to
automatically detect drives (i.e. IDE HDD and CDROMS) it would freeze. Taking
the USB memory stick out and booting again would be fine.

If you are using an E-SATA port and the drive is in an external case, you
might have to suffer waiting until the computer proceedes past the drive
detection process before you plug it in. I know it's a pain in the arse but
there might be no immediate solution.

Try checking for BIOS updates for your mother board. I don't advise mother
board BIOS flash updates unless you are comfortable with doing it and
understand the consiquences if something goes wrong.

 

[Guest]

I just got a Compaq presario with vista basic on, it has a 250gb SATA II
drive so i added my 350gb IDE drive and it wouldn't boot either, what i did
see was in the bios my IDE drive was chosen to be the 2nd boot device after
my dvd drive. I couldn't change it at this screen but found out this Compaq
sets device class booting orders to, dvd/cd drives first and hdd's 2nd, at
this screen i could choose which hdd to be default boot device. Probably your
pc as 2 conflicting boot drives to and thus cant choose what to boot from.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your response! Yeah i believe it is just a bios issue and not a
Vista issue. In my BIOS i have fooled w/ the boot sequence a bit but still no
luck. I am currently using: 1st-DVDrom, 2nd-HDD, 3rd-HDD.... But as you can
see i cannot specify which HDD to boot FIRST. Which really blows. haha to say
the least. Anyway. Any more suggestions would be appreciated. It only seems
logical to me that in the boot sequence it would try and identify a boot file
and if it does not find one on one HDD then it would go to the next..... but
that i know is a bit too much to ask for a machine to do...

 

[Dominic Payer]

In some BIOSes there is a second menu to specify the HDD boot order when
there are several HDDs. If your boot option is listed only as HDD I would
expect to see the second menu somewhere nearby.

The HDD firmware version can be an issue with some motherboards, as can the
BIOS version. The disks may not have the same firmware version.

Is your original HDD plugged to SATA port 1 and the newer one to SATA 2 or
higher?

There might be a fault on one of the HDDs. Try running Western Digital's
Data Lifeguard Diagnostic from
http://support.wdc.com/download/downloadxml.asp

Since your system is freezing at the BIOS screen, the problem is most likely
to be hardware related. Look at your motherboard manufacturer's forums to
see if others are reporting similar problems.

 

[Richard Urban]

I have seen this happen when creating a partition on a new hard drive using
Vista Disk Management. But, it doesn't happen all the time. I believe it has
to do with the fact that Vista only creates primary partitions. Whenever you
install a 2nd, 3rd etc. drive it should really be formatted as a logical
partition. I know there will be fights about this statement but there is no
reason that I can discern that data need be kept in a primary partition.

I did a bit of detective work by booting up using the Acronis Disk Director
Suite CD. What I have found in 4-5 instances is that there is a boot flag
that has been set on the second hard drive (it doesn't happen all the time).
I removed the boot flag from the 2nd drive, removed the CD and rebooted the
computer. Everything was now fine.

www.acronis.com


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Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)