Ok i had 3 hard drives in my computer,8.4 gig Master IDE 1 C: with Win98SE my Slave IDE 1 D: was an old 420 meg hard drive that i needed info off it.... my 20 gig Master IDE 2 E: which had Win XP and Slave IDE 2 F: My cd rom. Now i removed my 420 meg hard drive, but now i can't boot Win XP, cause the drive letter has changed. Is there way to edit the bootup file for XP??? Cause right now i can only use Win98. Also i get a message when i boot up my computer, it says "Secondary IDE Channel no 80 Conductor cable installed......ummmm what does that mean? Thanks in advance and i hope i made sense to all of you. ArcticWolf

The 80 wire connector error means you are not using an 80 wire 40 pin IDE cable. You are using a 40 wire 40 pin IDE cable. Just keep in mind that using the 40 wire cable you cannot set any drive on that cable to C/S (Cable Select) It has to be Master or Slave. C/S will not work. I'm not gonna touch the Dual boot issue. They can be bothersome at times and I'm not real strong on Dual Boot system. However I'm pretty sure it has to do with the fact that you removed the HDD and the MBR has stay the same and is report the wrong drive volume to windows. Thus you have you problem. You will probably have to fix your MBR which is not hard to do on a regular system. But you may run into problems on a Dual boot system if you don't know what you are doing. Maybe someone else will come along shortly and spell it out for you better.

So ummmm will a 40 wire/40 pin IDE cable cut down speed??? Cause another strange thing, is both my hard drives are running on ATA33??? But i'm pretty sure on a P III 667, that it goes to ATA66 or maybe even a ATA100, i have it set to AUTO in BIOS and that's what it is choosing. Maybe it's becuase of the wire? Thanks:ArcticWolf

Yes. It's because of the wire. With 80 wire you have ongoing two way communiction between the board and the HDD. With a forty wire cable you don't have that. It sends info and has to wait for a reply before it can send more. So it is slower than 80 wire.

Thank you for that info, i must have at least one 80 conductor cable in my machine, otherwise it would mention it for IDE channel one, but it doesn't... so all i have to do is change my 20 gig hard drive over to the 80 wire. Thanks :ArcticWolf

Your old 8.4 gig will only run ATA 33 because that's all the drive can do. Now the 20 gig if it is a newer drive will probably benefit more because it is probably designed to run a faster ATA speed. Your hardware configeration looks good. Best I can tell. Just get the 80 wire for the bigger HDD. If you were to put both drives on the same IDE cable the older drive would slow the newer drive down to it's speed. So keep it on a seperate IDE cable like you've got it.

Once you've got your wires sorted, you need to boot to your Xp cd and enter the Recovery console, use the FIXMBR command to restore your boot sector.