Hey all. I've got an Alienware PC with an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard. It has two hard drives: they are both 250GB Western Digital SATA drives. They are connected to SATA1 and SATA3 ports, and are not part of a RAID configuration. My system works great like this. A problem arises when I try to add a third SATA drive. I have tried connecting it to both the SATA2 and SATA4 ports (this new drive is a Western Digital 300GB SATA). The drive is detected in the BIOS fine, and I set the boot priority in the correct order (my main bootable drive is first, followed by the other drive, followed by my new drive). However when I first reached the point just before Windows XP should load (with the scrolling bar), a message popped up initially saying: "Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware." I tried formatting the new drive with both FDISK and also inside XP using the Disk Management tool (I can only boot into Windows by connecting the drive after Windows has booted). This has not helped at all. Since attempting to format the new drive, I get a new message just prior to the XP load screen, that mentions something along the lines of "the following file is missing or corrupt: <windows root>/system32/hal.dll". I think it was hal.dll, but I'm not 100% sure on that... So I can't get into Windows when I connect the new (third) hard drive. As soon as I unplug it, my PC boots fine again. As stated earlier, boot priorities for my drives *are* set correctly. Any ideas? I want to be able to get into Windows XP with all three drives functional (and without reformatting my original drive(s), if possible). Thanks for your time.

It sound's as if XP is still trying to boot to the new drive try putting your os drive in the location you have been trying with the new drive and putting the new drive in it's location (sound's simple but perhaps the location of the drives changes when you put in the third drive and makes it the primary location)

Add the third device in the fourth slot or move the second from 3 to 2 and add the third device in 3 or 4. My theory is that it didn't care that you had them in 1 and 3 but inserting one in between the two is causing a problem. So, keep them in the order that they were, adding the third as the third device instead of the second. HTH Bryan

Thank you for the fast replies, guys! I tried what you said, IamBiGePaNtS; I thought your suggestion might work at first, but unfortunately my PC still wouldn't boot properly when I added the new drive to another location. Then I followed your advice, Bryco. I moved my C: drive to SATA_1 and my D: drive to SATA_2, and checked the PC still booted up okay in this configuration (it worked fine). Then, I added my new drive to SATA_3, and checked the boot sequency was correct in the BIOS. This time it worked; I booted into Windows with no problems! Not exactly sure what was going wrong, since I was always using the correct boot order for my hard drives - perhaps my motherboard is just picky about which ports are being used? I guess it makes sense to use the ports in their number order, but Alienware sent the machine to me using SATA_1 and SATA_3 and I didn't want to play with their positioning unless it was necessary. Anyway, I'm now happy since I have an extra 280GB of space, and my PC is once again booting normally. Thanks for the help! I'd be lost without the internet... :)