[victor43]

I'm running Windows XP SP3 with two hard drives. I need to remove one drive from the BIOS as right now it stands as a Primary Slave. Only the first master drive is the active partition the secondary drive contains no system files only data. How to make sure Windows XP will still boot up if I disable this drive from the BIOS.

Victor

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Not sure I'm understanding the problem.
Primary master is always the system drive and primary slave is either a cdrom or second hd.
The system will only boot to the primary master drive unless it is setup as the primary slave being the boot drive.

[rshaffer61]

Not sure I'm understanding the problem.
Primary master is always the system drive and primary slave is either a cdrom or second hd.
The system will only boot to the primary master drive unless it is setup as the primary slave being the boot drive.

[victor43]

So if the second hard drive which is in my case is a primary slave contains only data files no windows system files can you just unplug the power to drive and will Windows XP still boot up properly ? I had a power outage once and ever since the secondary drive sometimes does not get detected during POST and then XP stalls during boot up. Gives me a System Disk failure message.

Thanks for the help.

Victor

Edited by victor43, 08 July 2010 - 04:31 PM.

[victor43]

Works fine now by just unplugging the second drive. Sorry for the confusion. Thanks for the help.

[rshaffer61]

Yes as you see it works but now you have no access to the data on the second drive.
You could try moving it to the second ide controller.