XP will not boot after adding 2nd HDD

I have a 7 year old eMachines T2240 pc running XP Home Edition SP3 (which over the years has been upgraded with a new video card, sound card and RAM) which recently started experiencing HDD trouble. A co-worker had two Western Digital 7200 rpm, 120g HDDs which he had used a couple times for backup storage before upgrading to larger drives so I was able to score these for $5 each. Before buying them, he brought them to work and connected them to a external enclosure to make sure there were no files on them and both drives were ok.

After uninstalling my dying Seagate 40g drive, and connecting one of the new HDDs to the master end of my EIDE cable, I was able to use Acronis to image the drive with two partitions. One is the original 40g active bootable partition from the Seagate drive and the other is a 70g logical partition. The pc boots fine. For some reason I am only seeing 110g on the drive but that's a separate issue.

Everything is fine and dandy until I connect the second HDD to the slave connector. The pc will post and see both drives, load the Windows splash screen then nothing, just a black screen. I have tried setting the jumpers on the drives as (1)master and (2)slave, (1)cable select and (2)cable select and (1)master and (2)cable select. Every boot attempt is the same. I can go into BIOS and see both drives and have made sure the boot order sees the primary master drive first but I cannot boot up after exiting BIOS.

Unplugging the slave HDD allows the machine to boot normally.

I have even booted back into Acronis and repartitioned the slave drive (which shows up as 110g instead on 120g) as a single logical partition and still get nowhere.

I have added HDDs to systems before and never ran into this. Any ideas other than the slave drive died as soon as it was installed? I have the feeling I am overlooking something obvious.

Re: XP will not boot after adding 2nd HDD

Thanks for the suggestions David!

I think I found the culprit.

I finally got it to boot into safe mode with both drives connected. I had to set the master drive's jumper to cs and the slave's jumper to slave. (Told you I was overlooking something simple.)

I was able to get booted into Windows and the system was stable for a couple minutes then rebooted itself. This led to a looping reboot cycle where I might make it to the Windows splash screen or I might make it all the way to the desktop before the next reboot. The last time I had seen this behavior was when a RAM stick died.

I have a 128M and a 512M stick installed so I reseated them and got the same result. I then removed the 128M stick which yielded identical results, but removing the 512M stick allowed me to boot stable into safe mode. I was able to navigate around and check my drives. They both show up with one partitioned to 40G and 71G and the other as 111G. (I have since remembered that manufacturers round up and overstate the drive size and doing the math proves the difference.)

I tried booting into normal mode but there are so many background processes running (NIS, Ad-Aware, BOINC SETI@home, etc... that 128M RAM doesn't cut it and the system bogs down to the point that it becomes inoperable.

So it looks like both HDDs are in good working order and I have 2G of PNY RAM on the way from Newegg.

Re: XP will not boot after adding 2nd HDD

Yeah I thought it was wierd that with the 40g Seagate I had the jumper set to master but the Western Digital will only boot when set to cs, even with no slave drive attached. I just chalked that up to an eMachines mobo but I will investigate further. I ran memtest86 last night and it confirmed the 512m stick was bad.

Re: XP will not boot after adding 2nd HDD

Yeah, Patrick. I forgot about doing the math at first, then it came creeping back to me after thinking about it for a while. That's what I get for not utilizing my A+ skills for two years...