Boot up problem.

DiamondMax Plus 9. I tried jumpers on Master/Slace, and also on Cable Select.No difference in results.

~Dave

6Y080L0, 6Y080P0 or 6Y080M0

With 80 conductor cables, the only proper setting is (Cable Select)

"The jumper over the J48 position is configuring the drive for Cable Select."
- Maxtor

You would place it on the connector marked master.

Bob

Ok, thanks. The number I found is:
6Y080P0422211

Yes. I tried the jumpers on CS and also on the Masrer/Slave as you say. There was no difference in either configuration. The Master still had to have the slave connected in order to boor.

~Dave

You didn't reveal if you fitted a new 80 conductor IDE cable...

Bob

Oh, sorry. Yes, they are the new round UV-reactive 80 conductor cables that come with the Lanparty board. The System/Master/Slave plugs are all marked.

~Dave

Is the BIOS the latest?

I already tried old flat 80 conductor cables. No joy.
And I have verified the latest BIOS: 6/23/2003.

I'm thinking that a file identifying the XP drive as a system disk got transfered to the Linux drive, and now requires that drive to be connected to find the needed file. But somehow the Linux drive is now un-bootable altogether, so I have no access to anything on it. But as it stands now, the XP drive is not recognized as a system disk without the other drive connected as the slave. I'm going crazy.

~Dave

Ok, nothing has worked. I had to reconnect the slave drive to even get the XP CD to recognize that there was a Windows installation on my primary hdd. So I went through the entire 39 minute process of letting Windows Setup "repair" my installation. So I completed that process and then, after sucessfully booting into XP with all my old settings, I shut down and disconnected my slave drive. Then I attempted a boot with only my XP hdd connected. This is the error I got:

BOOT DISK FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.

It looks like my system is to be forever tied to this primary slave drive for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend. If you have any other suggestions, I'd be greatful to hear them.

Thanks again,

~Dave

Don't panic yet. The "No OS" and "Boot disk failure", while sound ominous, but still could be a simple BIOS setting that is thwarting our attempts to fix the MBR.

When dealing with boot sector issues and rewriting same, the BIOS Virus Protection must be disabled.

Bob

I just checked. The virus warning in the BIOS is Disabled.

~Dave

There's no standard here, so I wonder if there's another entry in the BIOS that noted "protection."

Since the BIOS detects the hard disk, the whole discussion now reads like the MBR isn't proper.

OR the other drive is/was the boot drive and you are trying to move what boots. Some BIOS allowed the other drive to be the boot drive or to swap master/slave and so on.

Somethings fishy. Either the HD is protected by the BIOS as to the MBR or you have to use an Windows 98 boot diskette and FDISK /MBR that drive to really make it bootable as well as make sure the partition is "Active."

Bob

"Somethings fishy. Either the HD is protected by the BIOS as to the MBR or you have to use an Windows 98 boot diskette and FDISK /MBR that drive to really make it bootable as well as make sure the partition is "Active."
=============================================

I forgot to say that I'm using NTFS. I don't know if that makes a difference or not. Can I still fdisk /mbr given this information?

~Dave

"NOTE: The following procedure is not supported by Microsoft and is performed strictly at the discretion of the user. Microsoft assumes no liability for lost or corrupted data. This procedure should be performed only as a last resort"
===========================================

Do I run this on both drives, or just the XP drive?

And does the above note mean that The XP drive will become unbootable after the MBR is reset?

And there is no comment on whether this applies to a NTFS XP Pro system.

Could you clear this up for me please?

~Dave

I just went ahead and tried it. The fdisk /mbr seems to have worked. Thank you very much for all the help. I really appreciate it.

~Dave

There were other articles about this, but this one noted LILO, FDISK /MBR and XP. NTFS is a non-issue since the work is being done on the MBR and not the file system.

Bob