I decided, oh I'll hook one of my IDE HDDS up today, because I dont have a massive PSU with a million P2 connectors on it I thought I'd unhook my CD-rom drive (Who needs one if you have a DVD/CD-RW burner combo?) So I unhooked it, cut my hands up hooking the HDD up and rewiring things..... Went to boot my computer, nothing.... I though hmmmm Ram? So I pop my added PC2700 out.... no boot.... ok what did I fry? I Yank the hard drive out..... still no boot..... ok what is wrong here? my parents will kill me if its fried.... so I plug the CD-rom back in just because.... what do you know, boots.... ok.. I Shut it off, unhook CD-Rom drive, it wont boot, but before it blue screens and restarts I quickly plug it in, and low and behold windows loads a second AFTER I plug it in..... can somebody explain to me what the heck this is? I mean..... a CD-rom NOT letting windows boot, does this mean it doesnt like hardware change, or its just a POS? I am really frustrated and irritated that I need to have a CD-Rom drive hooked up to run my OS when I could have another 160 gigs..... Bah!!!!!!! Any ideas?
A fuming Gunny!
Is the BIOS looking for the CDrom?
Some systems will hang at boot because they are looking for a device that has been identified by the BIOS as being in the system and if it cant find it, it will hang. You switched a CD or a hard drive... you may have the system confused. You most go into the BIOS and set things up properly, you cant just swap hardware and have it all work.
Enter the BIOS and disable the CDrom on the IDE channel. Tell it there is no device. Also, make sure in the BIOS the CDrom is not set as the first boot device or the BIOS may look for it and not pass if it cannot find the unit. Once you reboot, shut the system down and install the hard drive then re-enter the BIOS and enable the channel for 'auto' sense.
It should clear the old information and then load the new drive without hanging
It depends on the motherboard and BIOS how that all works.
Let me warn you about something else too... NEVER hot plug a drive.. either the power OR the IDE cable, you will burn up the drive or the I/O controller on the motherboard.
Last edited by NicksFXHouse on Fri Oct 13, 2006 10:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.