Windows XP sees 2 hard disks when I only have 1

[Phoebe5000]

I have an HP Pavillion laptop which is nearly 2 years old. About a
month ago I got a BSOD with an unmountable boot partition error.
After much to-ing and fro-ing I finally bought a new hard drive (320Gb
Western Digital) to replace the original 80Gb Fujitsu. I installed
the new drive, installed Windows XP to the new drive and then used my
HP Recovery disks to re-build the system again. The problem I have
now is that I've started to get another BSOD with STOP 0xF4. Windows
XP loads successfully but about 20-30 seconds after the desktop has
loaded it goes to the BSOD. None of the knowledge base articles
really seem to apply though.

As an interesting side point however, if I go into Disk Manager or
Device Manager it shows both the Fujitsu and the Western Digital hard
drives. In disk management, Disk 0 is the Fujitsu which contains
Drive C:, Drive D: (Recovery Partition) and 1Gb unused. Disk 1 is the
Western Digital with 300Gb of unused, unformatted. I am assuming that
this is somehow confusing matters but I don't know how to correct
it.

If I go into the BIOS and run the diagnostic on the primary disk it
fails but secondary is fine even though XP boots up OK.

Any ideas?

 

[Phoebe5000]

Sorry - forgot one other important bit of info. If I boot the laptop
into Safe Mode with networking the whole thing works absolutely fine.
As soon as I try and boot normally I get the BSOD. I have also tried
the utility to disable startup applications to see if I could identify
something with that that caused the problem but no difference.

 

[Bill Blanton]

Just to be clear, you presently only have the one WD drive connected?

 

[Phoebe5000]

Just to be clear, you presently only have the one WD drive connected?

Only the one yes. But things have moved on and the laptop has now
completely died. I've tried re-installing XP but it just gets
completely twisted up trying to find the non-existant Fujitsu. Now I
just get a Stop 0x8E error which is allegedly to do with RAM but I
suspect is all linked to this same problem. The BIOS is very basic
and gives me no opportunity to sort out the disk assignment. So I'm
stumped.

Any ideas?

 

[Bill Blanton]

Only the one yes. But things have moved on and the laptop has now
completely died. I've tried re-installing XP but it just gets
completely twisted up trying to find the non-existant Fujitsu. Now I
just get a Stop 0x8E error which is allegedly to do with RAM but I
suspect is all linked to this same problem. The BIOS is very basic
and gives me no opportunity to sort out the disk assignment. So I'm
stumped.

You also said:
"If I go into the BIOS and run the diagnostic on the primary disk it
fails but secondary is fine even though XP boots up OK."

Did you jumper the WD drive correctly as Master, or Single (if applicable)?

Any ideas?

Not many... A good place to start would be to do an extensive test of
the RAM with something like Memtest86.
http://www.memtest86.com/

As far as XP seeing the disconnected Fujitsu, I can only guess that it had
something to do with that drive's information being hardwired into the HP
recovery partition. If the recovery partition was simply a restored "mirror" of the
original install, then it would have the Fujistu's information stored in the Window's
registry.

You'd think Windows would have sorted it out, but if you are having RAM
problems, or anything related to the bussing of the bits to and from the
RAM and the CPU, strange things are possible.