[eswrite]

Just spent 8 hours, late into the night, hooking up my new HTPC system. So far, so frustrating.


First, my Coolermaster PSU (SilentMax 350W ATX12V-350SD) doesn't seem to like my ABIT NF7-S motherboard. I can power up the first time and boot into a floppy with my Radeon 9000 as a minimum configuration (by now I have Windows XP running and 2 HD installed + 1 DVD ROM), but when after I power off using the button, I can't power back on until I totally cut out power to the PSU (unplug the power cable or turn off my power strip until the onboard red led goes out). I guess I could live with this, as I plan to leave the PC on 24/7, but the occassional powerdown will be annoying.


Second, I got my system up and running with my primary Maxtor 160GB holding my WinXP OS. But when I installed my Western Digital 200GB on the secondary IDE bus as master, boot up became very sluggish. So I returned it to cable select, and it booted up much faster, but then I got the dreaded "NTLDR is missing, press CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot" error. Things are okay if I reboot into C:\\ with the XP CD in the DVD drive, but when it comes out, reboot fails. When I disconnect the WD drive, the problem goes away. And yes, I went to Google and found that one should re-copy ntldr and ntdetect.com to C:\\ while in recovery mode, to no avail. Reinstalled Windows with both drives in; recovered Windows, nada. So... I ended up installing the Ultra ATA controller that came with the drive, eating up one of my precious PCI slots and cutting on my air flow, arg!, and of course, the world is a better place now.


So I am sleepless, cranky, and still looking forward to finally getting myHD in there and watching some HDTV... After of course, I do the Powerstrip thing, which is going to be, like, so easy, right?

 

[WMAMan]

I can't help you with the power problem but I may be able to help you with the bootup problem. Try these.


1. Some older Compaq shipped with special cable select cables. The cable is lables System Board, Drive 0 and Drive 1. If your cable is labled that way you should try to get your system running with the drives set to cables select (both of them).


2. I have noticed that Maxtor has alternate jumper settings on thier web site that is different than the documentation. I have on occation had to use those setting to get multiple hard drives to work in Dell Optiplex. You may as well look at WD site too.


3. Move the WD to the secondary bus. Don't worry about the CD ROM slowing down the bus. That "mixed DMA" problem was fixed way back when DMA16.6 was introduced. As a side benefit transfers from one hard drive to another will be slightly faster because you are using seperate buses.


You don't need that PCI ATA controller. It slows bootup time, is not faster and forces een more interupt sharing.


Hope that helps.

 

[eswrite]

Thanks, WMAMan. I definitely want to get rid of that ATA controller. Let me make sure I understand you correctly.


My configuration right now has IDE bus 1 with Maxtor 160GB as master and DVD ROM as slave, IDE bus 2 with Western Digital as cable select. You are saying, make the Maxtor 160GB cable select also, right? What about the DVD ROM: leave it as slave, or make it cable select?


BTW, both Maxtor and Western Digital blow big time on their printed documentation. Following their steps by steps for installation, neither one matched up what their software did with what the documentation said would happen. Thank Lord Bill Gates for XP taking up the slack and allowing me partition and format the Maxtor, or I would have been dead in the water.

 

[cowtown]

Your power issues sounds like the power connector from the power switch to your motherboard may be on backwards. I've seen some boards that behaved the way you describe when that was the case.


The reason you got the NTLDR error was because you changed the phsyical hardware path that the operating system was installed to and the Boot.ini file holds that information to tell the NTLDR where to find the OS. You can edit this boot.ini file to correct what is called the ARC path. I can't remember the syntax for that line off the top of my head but if you look at that route just go to Microsoft's website to the support area or Technet and do a search for boot.ini arc path and you should find something on that.


I'd run both drives on seperate channels as the primary drive on both for best performance. Generally now cable select works fine, it used to be a real dark art and drives may have said they supported it but it often didn't work. Make sure when you plug the drives in that the right coloured end goes into the motherboard and the hard drive is the LAST drive on the cable. The CD-ROM can go on the same cable but make sure it's on the middle connector of the cable. As WMA says newer CD-ROM drives shouldn't cause any slowdown issues but it's easy enough to test if it reoccurs when you change your configuration.


To make the drives work properly make sure that if any drive on a cable is set to cable select that any other drives on that same cable are set to cable select as well.

 

[eswrite]

Quote:

The reason you got the NTLDR error was because you changed the phsyical hardware path that the operating system was installed to and the Boot.ini file holds that information...

Hmm. I just remembered something. My Maxtor 160GB is configured into two partitions which showed up as C: and D: prior to installing the Western Digital 200GB drive. As soon as I installed the latter, it became the D: drive, and the 2nd Maxtor partition became E:, with the DVD pushed to F:. So now I have:

Maxtor-partition 1 = C:

Western Digital (single partition) = D:

Maxtor-partition 2 = E:


No idea why XP did something this wild, but could that be the issue? If so, I can use Disk Manager to swap the drive letters, right?

 

[cowtown]

It's not Windows XP. When you Fdisked (partitioned) your second hard drive you created another primary partition. Primary partitions always get preference as it were for drive lettering so if you had 3 hard drives with 3 primary partitions they would be C, D and E respectively regardless of what other partitions you have.


What you should do is remove any partitions off of the second drive and when you are running Fdisk create an extended partition and then create logical partitions within there. There doesn't have to be any primary drive on a disk that is just holding data. This way the main bootable drive will be C and the others will get letters based on their position, so for example.


Disk 0


Primary partition = c:

Extended partition

- Logical partition 1 = d:

- Logical partition 2 = e:


Disk 1


Extended partition

- Logical partition 1 = f:

- Logical partition 2 = g:

etc etc.


And yes you can use Disk Manager to swap the drive letters if you want but I don't know how this will affect any boot up sequences. As I said the above solution would be ideal from a technical standpoint.


When I said you changed the path of where the drive was located you actually changed it position on the cable and drive controller. Windows XP was likely set up expecting the drive to be on controller 1 in the primary position and it got moved to controller 1 in the secondary spot which OS like 2000 and XP typically don't like. I'm only going off what you said in the first post so I'd say that's the likely situation. Cable select basically means that drive 1, the primary one is the drive at the very end of the cable, the secondary drive is the one in the middle. When you switched both drives to cable select (nothing wrong with that as per my last post) you effectively changed the physical hardware address of your hard drive with the OS on it and XP dunna like that. I think if you went and made sure your primary drive was on the very end of that cable you'd be much happier.


Regards,

 

[eswrite]

Thanks! Will try this as soon as I get home.

 

[eswrite]

cowtown -- your suggestion worked. See my thread titled "Solution: 'NTLDR is missing'"

 

[cowtown]

Good to hear!

 

[eswrite]

One more small victory: I found a work-around/solution. Under "Power Management Setup", I changed the "Power On Function" from "BUTTON ONLY" (factory default setting) to "Any Key", and voila! Not only can I power up with a key stroke, but the Power button works as well. So I'll leave the BIOS be and call it a victory. Again, this is with an ABIT NF7-S motherboard and a Coolermaster PSU (SilentMax 350W ATX12V-350SD). Posting here hoping someone else benefits from a future search...