I've been operating with 2 40 gig hard drives in my computer, the primary for XP and programs, the second basically for extra storage. I removed the second hard drive today, reset the 1st's jumper to Master, and then booted. The BIOS stalls and won't run the opsys. I also tried the primary with jumper set to Cable Select. Still won't work. What's going on? Why can't I operate with only 1 HDD? Thanks for any help... Noel

Hi Noel, Some hard drives have a "Single" setting, such as Western Digital. That setting is if the hard drive is the only device on the IDE cable. Best Regards and Wishes, Mesich, Webmaster of mesich.com Currently stored on a temporary webhost.

The original disk was the system disk in fact. It had the mbr that was needed to boot to the OS. Put it back in. Do a full backup and then remove the drive. Then install xp on the remaining disk and recover backup. You can do any number of disk images but remember that images are exact copies. You may have to fix the install with an image.

You may have inadvertantly loaded XP on the second drive. The boot files will always be on C but the system can be anywhere. http://computervitals.com/

just a quick question. ok so if the primary which had the OS on it was already installed as a primary drive or the first drive. why would you have had to go in and change any jumpers on it at all?? i mean you should have just been able to remove the 2nd drive and rebooted no?? or am i missing something here?? what was the primary set to BEFORE you removed the 2nd drive??

Hi all, thanks for your responses... I had a larger (100 gig) as drive #2 for storage and was swapping out my 2 40 gig drives every week as #1 (using one in reserve as a full backup and one on the computer). Everything worked fine!! All 3 drives set to Cable Select. Then I decided I wanted to remove the second drive completely (100 gig) and just use one 40 gig as primary - I reset the jumper on the primary to Master and the BIOS would stall, so reset it back to Cable Select - that didn't work either. Every time I booted with only one drive, the BIOS would just stall, wouldn't go anywhere... Seems to me I could take any computer, install a single drive and then put an opsys on it. Doesn't work for me with these drives :) I've had this computer for a long time, so not absolutly sure which of the 2 40 gigs is the original - (I think my Western Digital. The other is Maxtor). I'll test with the WD as sole drive and see what happens. Thanks, Noel