XP Home won't boot with slave HD connected

[Tony Eva]

My PC has XP Home, 1 hard drive C:, DVD and CDRW drives D: and E:.
All working fine until I installed some duff memory. Then, XP booted
to the desktop but then crashed. I reset the PC, XP booted to the
desktop, crashed.

So I took the duff memory out again to get back to the original setup.
XP now wouldn't boot... it popped up the screen where you select safe
mode, normal mode, last good config etc but none of these would boot
at all. Clearly the HD had been corrupted.

I got a new HD, connected it in place of the old one, and did a
completely fresh install of XP (with the old HD disconnected). No
problems - all boots fine.

Then I reconnected the old HD as the slave on the primary IDE so I
could recover the files. Now XP boots as far as the logo + progress
bar, but then BSODs with 'IRQL_LESS_OR_EQUAL' (?) error. Remove the
old HD from the IDE - XP boots fine. Put it back: XP BSODs. (The
BIOS, incidentally, recognises and correctly identifies the old HD
when it's connected.)

I tried removing the DVD and CDRW from the secondary IDE and putting
the old HD as the master on the secondary IDE - XP still BSODs.

I created a DOS boot floppy with the 'readntfs.exe' utility, and that
booted fine with the old HD connected. I ran readntfs and it showed
all the files and folders on the old HD, and everything looked fine.
So the data is there; but something is stopping XP from booting when
the HD is connected.

I also tried booting into XP recovery mode from the installation CD,
but as soon as it tried to read from the old HD, it also crashed.

All I want to do is copy all my files off the corrupted HD before
reformatting it (there's too much to lose) but I can't do that until I
can get XP to boot up with the HD connected.

Does anyone know how I can get XP to boot with the HD connected, or
any other way to recover the data? Is there any utility I can run
from floppy that will diagnose and fix HD structural errors without
losing the files on the disk?

TIA

 

[Alias]

Did you set the jumpers of the old hard drive to "slave"?

Alias

 

[Dave]

buy a usb hard drive enclosure, about $75, and plug in the usb cable after
XP is up and running, worked for me once and is worth the price to save the
data.

--

 

[Tony Eva]

Did you set the jumpers of the old hard drive to "slave"?

Alias

Yes. The drives are both set for cable select and the IDE
interface supports it.

Like I said, I can read both drives from a DOS boot floppy
using READNTFS.EXE, so they are correctly connected. The
BIOS also sees and correctly identifies both drives. It's
just XP that won't boot.

Unfortunately READNTFS can only copy from NTFS to FAT, and
I want to restore from one HD to the other (NTFS to NTFS).
AFAIK there is nothing (free or cheap) that allows me to
boot from floppy or CD and have read/write access to NTFS
volumes - is there?

 

[ByTor]

Yes. The drives are both set for cable select and the IDE
interface supports it.

Like I said, I can read both drives from a DOS boot floppy
using READNTFS.EXE, so they are correctly connected. The
BIOS also sees and correctly identifies both drives. It's
just XP that won't boot.

Unfortunately READNTFS can only copy from NTFS to FAT, and
I want to restore from one HD to the other (NTFS to NTFS).
AFAIK there is nothing (free or cheap) that allows me to
boot from floppy or CD and have read/write access to NTFS
volumes - is there?

Tony, I would suggest this as you may have a conflict with "two" active
OS's at once confusing your system.......The status on the 2nd drive has
to be changed, once done you can have XOSL set to view your second
drives OS partition viewed with your first...........

http://www2.arnes.si/~fkomar/xosl.org/

Give it a little read though.....I'm only taking a shot here as I have
had this happen to me on several occasions with other machines....Than
again I use other methods that might not be available for ya....$$$$$$

Anyway give it a whirl I'm sure it won't hurt your system as I believe
XOSL can actually be run standalone from CD or floppy.....Anyway, give
it a read.........

 

[Keith]

Set the jumpers so master is master and slave is slave.
Problem solved.

 

[Tony Eva]

Tony, I would suggest this as you may have a conflict with "two" active
OS's at once confusing your system.......The status on the 2nd drive has
to be changed, once done you can have XOSL set to view your second
drives OS partition viewed with your first...........

http://www2.arnes.si/~fkomar/xosl.org/

Give it a little read though.....I'm only taking a shot here as I have
had this happen to me on several occasions with other machines....Than
again I use other methods that might not be available for ya....$$$$$$

Anyway give it a whirl I'm sure it won't hurt your system as I believe
XOSL can actually be run standalone from CD or floppy.....Anyway, give
it a read.........

Thanks for the info, XOSL looks useful and I'll read up on it a bit
more.

I have now (sort of) solved my problem by using INSERT
(www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html) which can see both HDs
without any problems. By mounting the new drive using the captive
file system, I can get NTFS write access to it and I'm able to copy
from the old to the new. It's very very slow though (only about
50kB/sec transfer rate) so it'd be useful to know about a better way.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Jason Marshall]

Change your drive from Master / Slave or vice versa.

 

[ByTor]

Thanks for the info, XOSL looks useful and I'll read up on it a bit
more.

I have now (sort of) solved my problem by using INSERT
(www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html) which can see both HDs
without any problems. By mounting the new drive using the captive
file system, I can get NTFS write access to it and I'm able to copy
from the old to the new. It's very very slow though (only about
50kB/sec transfer rate) so it'd be useful to know about a better way.

Thanks for the help.

Hmmmm, looks useful..never heard of it though.....Me personally I would
quickly use PartitionMagic to check the status of the old drive and
change it to inactive......Anyway, I'd still give XOSL a shot, it's not
as hard as it looks...........
I noticed people have been suggesting proper pin configurations on the
drives, I take it you have done this? Have you tried "cable
select"....Believe it or not I've had dopey drives in the past that one
or a combo would not play nice together unless I used the cable select
option.............

Good Luck.....

 

[Ron Sommer]

Hmmmm, looks useful..never heard of it though.....Me personally I would
quickly use PartitionMagic to check the status of the old drive and
change it to inactive......Anyway, I'd still give XOSL a shot, it's not
as hard as it looks...........
I noticed people have been suggesting proper pin configurations on the
drives, I take it you have done this? Have you tried "cable
select"....Believe it or not I've had dopey drives in the past that one
or a combo would not play nice together unless I used the cable select
option.............

Good Luck.....

The OP stated the drive was placed on the secondary IDE cable and the
computer still wouldn't boot.

I have had drives go bad and will stop an operating system from booting even
when connected to the secondary IDE.