Hi, i switched my secondary hard-drive in my pc temporally with no problems but when i switched the original one back there is a difference. My pc still loads up but pauses for about 5 minutes with a blank screen right after booting. Apart from this problem the pc is fully functional. Does anyone know what is going on and what is the solution. I had a tinker about with the BIOS settings but that didn't seem to help

any ideas?

thanks
Alistair

Are all cables securely connected?
Is the HD correctly jumpered?
Is it connected to the correct(middle) IDE cable connector?
Is the IDE connector properly oriented(red, blue, or gray stripe along the one edge of the IDE cable next the power lead at the back of the drive)?
Did you try a different power lead or IDE cable?
Which BIOS settings did you modify?
Is 'Auto Detect' enabled in BIOS?

Also, which version of Windows?

thanks for your swift advice. I have managed to fix my problem, it was fixed by switching around the IDE's of the HD's.

But i have another question...

My other pc was messed up because i installed a faulty wireless NIC, and crashed half-way through installing the drivers and taking out Windows 2000 pro at the same time. I decided to format my HD and reinstall but for some unknown reason, i couldn't format my disk (on another system). Don't have a clue why

Anyway, the only way i could get an OS running on the PC was to install windows XP on drive D:

so, my question is: Is it possible to change around my drives so that Win XP is on C: and my other disk drive is D:?

thank you v much,
Alistair

You can move the partition from one drive to another using a number of utilities (directly copy the partition using Partition Magic or Drive Copy or a Utility from the maker of the HDD) or (create an image of the partition using Drive Image or Ghost and then restore that image onto the other drive).

That should take care of the WinXP system partition. However you may still have a problem with the boot partition and/or its partition boot sector - since it is not obvious from your post which drive was active at the time you did the installation. The partition boot sector and the boot loader files will all reside on that active partition.

Should any boot problems ensue you will either need to rebuild the boot processes from the Recovery Console using the bootcfg command or by running a full Repair Installation from the WinXP CD.

The drive letter may or may not stay as D even after moving it to the other hard drive. WinXP itself wont let you change the drive letter. You can force a change using partition magic, but you will then almost certainly need to run a repair installation to get things going properly again.