In response to someone who said they were not able to boot one morning due to a "missing NTLDR"... Well, I wouldn't be surprised if the bad drive is a Western Digital WD800 made around 2002. I've already seen 4 of these fail and I hardly ever work with defective computers... The best thing to do when something like this happens, is to disconnect the drive, and put in a new one, and install Windows XP on it. Then, once everything is running properly, you connect the non-working drive to the second IDE controller and try to boot. If you can get into windows, (it may take some messing around in the BIOS to get the computer to recognize the bad drive sometimes and make sure it boots from the new drive), then you can see if you can read the files. If not, then use a program called R-Studio, and this program will attempt -REALLY HARD- to read through the whole drive to let you recover any file that is still readable. This program is truly amazing--it will read drives that windows reports as "unformatted"... I have just recovered all the user files from a drive (WD800) that would hardly respond... Tek.

It does not always mean though that your hard drive is dead. One of my friends who is a NOOB to computers tried installing 98 on a second hard drive while he had XP on another and it froze up. Then when he booted he got that message. It was simply because the other hard drive was set for master ( The non XP one) and it tried to boot from it. Processor P4@ 2.6 Ghz, FSB@535Mhz RAM 512MB's PC2700/32001 256 stick of each. Hard Disk Drives 1 40 GB HD 1 10 GB HD CD/DVD Drives CDRW52X

Yeah, good point--that was always a very wierd thing with 95/98. To this day I don't know if WinXP is smarter. If you have 2 WinXP primary active drives will the computer get confused? Well in this case the drive is a bad drive--SMART error. I believe the problem is that the computer tries to read all the drives as it's booting up and this one responds so slowly it pauses a lot. I found that it's possible to hook up the bad drive to the second IDE controller and not have the power connected to it, and then after boot, I can plug in the power and scan to recognize the drive in device manager. Then I can run R-Studio and it will attempt to read all the drives. It pauses, just like windows did, but it will read it eventually. So this shows that the pause occurs by simply adding the drive to windows. Just like windows goes a little nuts when you put in a CD and it can't read it well. Maybe the best way to deal with bad drives is to connect them externally with USB after windows boots--I'm not sure that the internal IDE thing with plugging in the power later is electronically safe? Don't know why not, but does anyone know for sure? Tek.