Trying TO Remove HD?

Question

Alright I built my own system and for the lif of me cant figure this out. I think I have to re-install windows but before i do I thought I ask.

O have 3 HD's one 80 running the systems one 250 for gaming and one 320 for movies. Now i dont do much gaming anymore so I wana move movies to the 250 and sell the 320 but when i take the 320 out the system will not load XP it goes past bios load and then says Windows cant not load because of a hardware configuraion.

Any help apriciated.

Answer 1

Before reloading windows, try checking your bios settings for your hard drives. After you remove the 320, make sure your bios is not still recognizing it.

Answer 2

My first guess would be there is an issue with master and slave settings. What I mean is if the 320 was a master and the 250 a slave on the same IDE channel, the 250 would now have to now be set as the master. From Win2k on, the OS doesn't care what the bios reports because the ntkernel enumerates all hardware. If you can boot to CD or NTFS floppy, take a look in the boot log on the system root. Other than that, boot to the repair console on the CD and run repair.

Answer 3

Have you gone into the BIOS and had it rescan your attached drives? At least the BIOS would then recognize that there were only 2 drives, not 3.

Is it possible that you're actually booting off of the 320GB drive?

You could tell by booting from floppy and running fdisk to see which is the active partition.

Answer 4

Did you set up some sort of raid or parity across the drives.

Check you bios settings

Try removing it through windows remove hardware. that way when you boot windows the next time it may come up properly.

Answer 5

go into the bios and tell the bios that u have only two drives now. the bios is read by windows on boot up.