XP on secondary master after problems

[Code-Curious Mom]

After problems with XP-SP2 freezing/rebooting/shutting off, drive
diagnostics said the drive was failing. I then installed XP on the second
HD. After awhile, symptoms returned. Only worse, because it no longer
would even boot from floppy or CD. A new power supply and fresh copy of
ntldr and this 2nd installation of XP seems ok. Apparently the HD was the
victim rather than the cause.

But now I've got XP on the secondary master which it's calling C: and a
fouled up mess (fixboot caused it to think it's FAT12 -- ugh) on primary
master which it calls D:. Is this a potential problem performance-wise or
otherwise? Can we just physically swap the drives as to master/secondary or
will that confuse XP?

I plan to repartition/reformat the messed up drive as soon as I try to
recover a bit of data (most of our data was not on that drive).

Any comments or suggestions appreciated

 

[Malke]

After problems with XP-SP2 freezing/rebooting/shutting off, drive
diagnostics said the drive was failing. I then installed XP on the
second
HD. After awhile, symptoms returned. Only worse, because it no
longer
would even boot from floppy or CD. A new power supply and fresh copy
of
ntldr and this 2nd installation of XP seems ok. Apparently the HD was
the victim rather than the cause.

But now I've got XP on the secondary master which it's calling C: and
a fouled up mess (fixboot caused it to think it's FAT12 -- ugh) on
primary
master which it calls D:. Is this a potential problem
performance-wise or
otherwise? Can we just physically swap the drives as to
master/secondary or will that confuse XP?

I plan to repartition/reformat the messed up drive as soon as I try to
recover a bit of data (most of our data was not on that drive).

Any comments or suggestions appreciated

I think your best bet is to go with your instincts - back up your data
and do a clean install, setting up the machine the way you want.

Malke

 

[Code-Curious Mom]

Thanks a lot Malke, that's just what we will do then.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

After problems with XP-SP2 freezing/rebooting/shutting off,
drive diagnostics said the drive was failing. I then installed XP
on the second HD. After awhile, symptoms returned. Only
worse, because it no longer would even boot from floppy or
CD. A new power supply and fresh copy of ntldr and this 2nd
installation of XP seems ok. Apparently the HD was the
victim rather than the cause.

But now I've got XP on the secondary master which it's
calling C: and a fouled up mess (fixboot caused it to think
it's FAT12 -- ugh) on primary master which it calls D:.
Is this a potential problem performance-wise or otherwise?
Can we just physically swap the drives as to master/secondary
or will that confuse XP?

I plan to repartition/reformat the messed up drive as soon as
I try to recover a bit of data (most of our data was not on that
drive).

WinXP doesn't know if the hard drive that it's on is jumpered
"Master" or "Slave". That is for the BIOS (which uses it to set
its *default* hard drive boot order) and for the IDE controller
(to distinguish between 2 devices on the same channel). If your
newly installed XP on the 2nd drive is running (and naturally
calling itself "C:") and booting itself, you've apparently changed
the boot order in the BIOS to put the Master on ch. 1 at the
head of the BIOS's hard drive boot order. Is this true?
Or are the ntldr, boot.ini, and ntdetect.com files on hard drive 1
still functioning to load the OS from hard drive 2? You can tell
this by simply removing hard drive 1. If the newly installed
OS on the 2nd hard drive continues to load, both the "system"
partition (which loads the OS) and the "boot" partition (which
holds the OS) are one and the same and on hard drive 2.
Then you can simply jumper hard drive 2 as "Master", the old
hard drive as "Slave", and put them on channel 0 and allow
the default hard drive boot order to prevail. Or, you could
just leave the hard drives as they are because THERE IS
NOTHING INHERENTLY WRONG WITH THE OS RESIDING
ON, OR HAVING ITS LOADING BEING DONE BY, A SLAVE
DRIVE. MASTER/SLAVE MEANS NOTHING TO THE OS.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Code-Curious Mom]

Somehow I didn't see your post until shortly after we reinstalled.
(Actually what I meant was XP was the slave on Primary.) So basically it's
a moot point now, but since you took the time to answer, I'll reply to your
questions anyway.

If your
newly installed XP on the 2nd drive is running (and naturally
calling itself "C:") and booting itself, you've apparently changed
the boot order in the BIOS to put the Master on ch. 1 at the
head of the BIOS's hard drive boot order. Is this true?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by channel 1 and channel 0. Is channel 0
Primary and channel 1 Secondary? What I changed was IDE Primary Master to
'None' instead of 'Auto' and set HDD-1 (instead of HDD-0) as the HD to boot
in the boot order. I was hoping that this would make XP ignore the fouled
up drive entirely. It didn't, but it called it D:

Or are the ntldr, boot.ini, and ntdetect.com files on hard drive 1
still functioning to load the OS from hard drive 2?

I doubt it as the first HD would not boot at all.

I figured it would be acceptable to have XP on the slave drive, but did not
know if perhaps performance would be better on Master or if this unusual
setup would be more likely to encounter problems. Since there was no real
need for it to be that way, I figured better to reinstall now rather than
possibly need to later after all the programs etc. were installed.

Thanks for your time and explanation.