Can't Remove Second Hard Drive

[Carbo]

My PC's current setup has two hard drives in a cable select configuration. I want to pull the second disk from this box for use elsewhere. But, when I tried to do so, the PC won't boot. Even though the first drive contains the OS, (XP Pro), I can't get past the screen which tells me to Press F1 to retry or F2 to go into seup.
Is this the norm? Do I need to tweak the BIOS somehow?

 

[nanaki333]

are you sure you pulled the right drive? sounds like you pulled out the one that has the actual OS on it. check the BIOS and make sure it's picking up the one you left in. if all is well and it is the OS drive in there, but the BIOS is not picking it up. take out that drive and set the jumper to primary.

 

[Carbo]

Both disks have a copy of XP Pro on it. The second disk was a spare from an old PC. Does that make a difference?

 

[imported_Pipeline]

Is your first drive a Western Digital?

Western Digital Hard Drives have a special jumper setting for "Single". The reason why your system may be hanging at bootup is because it's searching the IDE channel for the slave drive - eventually (maybe 5 or 10 minutes) the search will timeout and boot will continue.

But setting the drive to "Single" would be more efficient....that way, your PC isn't looking for the slave drive that you removed.

Hope this helps.

 

[Carbo]

As a matter of fact, both drives are WD's. The first is an 80G, and the second is 40G's. So, you think it's just a jumper setting issue? If I pull the second and reset the primary drive's jumper, that might do it? I'll go to WD's site and get the correct setting for a single drive and see what happens.

 

[nanaki333]

it should be writtin on the drive itself