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[BuddyC]

A long time ago, I bought a 160 GB Seagate to throw all my music and such on. Shortly thereafter, my main HD crashed, so I purchased an 80 GB replacement. Well, things never quite worked right after that - Windows would take substantially longer to load and was very unstable. I knew it was a hardware problem, as sometimes the two HDs would fail to even appear in the BIOS.

After my laptop died this week, this became more of a problem. This afternoon I disconnected the second 160 GB and re-installed Windows on the first. No problems, everything runs smooth, etc.

Filled with confidence, I hook up the 160 GB. Windows hangs at the Windows XP logo screen. I let it sit for about 30 minutes and turn it off, disconnect the 160 GB. Now the 80 GB can't even load Windows.

So maybe installing Windows while they're both connected would fix my problems, yea? No. With the 160 GB connected, Windows Install is unable to delete or create files on the 80 GB. First it told me that it was unable to delete default.cab, then it was unable to create \WINDOWS...so...

If I disconnect the 160 GB, I'm sure I could reinstall Windows with no qualms. But then it'd just corrupt that install when I went to pull some data off. And, well, I can't have it connected while Windows Installs. I've checked jumper settings, cable settings, BIOS settings etc.

Any suggestions?

 

[aaaaa0]

A long time ago, I bought a 160 GB Seagate to throw all my music and such on. Shortly thereafter, my main HD crashed, so I purchased an 80 GB replacement. Well, things never quite worked right after that - Windows would take substantially longer to load and was very unstable. I knew it was a hardware problem, as sometimes the two HDs would fail to even appear in the BIOS.

After my laptop died this week, this became more of a problem. This afternoon I disconnected the second 160 GB and re-installed Windows on the first. No problems, everything runs smooth, etc.

Filled with confidence, I hook up the 160 GB. Windows hangs at the Windows XP logo screen. I let it sit for about 30 minutes and turn it off, disconnect the 160 GB. Now the 80 GB can't even load Windows.

So maybe installing Windows while they're both connected would fix my problems, yea? No. With the 160 GB connected, Windows Install is unable to delete or create files on the 80 GB. First it told me that it was unable to delete default.cab, then it was unable to create \WINDOWS...so...

If I disconnect the 160 GB, I'm sure I could reinstall Windows with no qualms. But then it'd just corrupt that install when I went to pull some data off. And, well, I can't have it connected while Windows Installs. I've checked jumper settings, cable settings, BIOS settings etc.

Any suggestions?

Make sure the jumpers on the hard drives are set up right with master/slave. One needs to be master, and the other needs to be slave if they're on the same IDE cable.

 

[golem]

try a different cable? or maybe put each hard drive on its own port on the mobo?

 

[BuddyC]

Don't ask me how, don't ask me why, but it looks like my problems all stemmed from...


...using a cheap PS/2 keyboard. Windows started right up after I replaced the PS/2 with a USB board.

 

[Jotaro]

This is because the PS/2 protocol demands much less bandwith than the USB protocol, and thus is much less fragile. I had it happen a couple times to me.