XP Pro says reboot when started

[ranger_cole]

Every time Xp Pro reboots or starts it says it has found new hardware and must reboot. I traced it to my slave hardrive formatted win 98 se fat32. Slave drive is a bootable drive and work fine. When this drive is removed the message goes away. In "Disk Management" you will see both as active hard disks. Disk 0 is the Primary drive (XP Pro). Disk 1 (win 98 se) is secondary storage.
Disk 1 is "Not Initialized". When I try to right-click on the "Disk 1" icon and select "Initialize" it fails at the end of the process.

[ktkendall]

Hi Ranger and welcome to PCMECH:
Your problem is quite curious, and brings me to ask a few questions. Can you go into your BIOS and change boot sequence and get the system to boot up to win98 from that HD?? How do you presently have the 2 drives cabled and jumpered??, and I assume both are on primary IDE channel.
KK

[ranger_cole]

On startup I can press F8 for a boot menu and yes I can boot from IDE 1 (win 98 se drive). Win Xp Pro is master drive and win 98se is slave. These are not primary dvd and cdrw are primary.

[ktkendall]

I'd say that proves the drive is good, cabled correctly, and jumpered OK. When in win98 does other drive show OK?? Only things that come to mind are to go into BIOS settings and set both to auto and if your bios has a place to autodetect harddrives then do that, and the recommended setup is to put HD's on primary ide with 80 wire cable and jumper both drives to 'CS' and put optical drives on secondary as master/slave. I don't know if that could be driving winxp wacky,, It shouldn't, but If I couldn't figure anything else out, I would perhaps try rearranging the IDE config to make HD's primary.

[ranger_cole]

Here is what I tried all afternoon: I switched xp pro drive to primary ide with dvd as slave and win 98 se drive master on 2ndary ide with cdrw as slave. Now when I try to boot up xp pro it loads and after appx 5 second it rebbot by itsself. The only way for xp not to reboot automatically is to not have any 2ndary devices.

[andyms18a]

do you have 2 drives set as active if you do that is your prob you can onley have one active drive normaley c: this is wair the boot files are storede evean if you have multy drives and multy opsys you still only have one active drive.

[ranger_cole]

What do mean by active?

[andyms18a]

when you use fdisk to partition a drive the c drive for example you
create a primery partition and set it to active.
did you take the slave drive from another computer ?. if so it was an active drive and this is causing your prob.
the only way i know to fix this prob is to put the win98 disk as the c: drive deleate the partition on the d drive then reinstall win xp on the d drive. you will then have 2 op sys and on start up winxp will create a bootloader wich will give you the choice of wich op sys to run ie win98 or xp. when you deleate your d drive partition every thing on it will be deleated so make a backup of the importent stuff. if you dont know how to remove partitions using fdisk post back and we will talk you throu it

[ranger_cole]

I had bulit this computer and started with win98se drive only. In Sept. 2002 I added another hd and installed win xp pro on this drive. I also installed win xp service pack 1. I tried to use a product called nicklock http://www.nicklock.com/ to switch/boot between drives but xp pro would always say found new hardware must reboot.

[andyms18a]

when you instalied xp did you keep the win98 drive in the computer ?

[KHT]

I`m curious as to why you installed a third party boot manager. If W98 was already installed and you installed Xp, you would have had the choice to either upgrade, "clean" install, or multi-boot.

XP will use it`s own boot manager and a third party manager is not necesarry unless you intend to be able to boot to multiple versions of W95-98-ME. (ex. Win98SE-Win98SE-WinXP)

If possible without to much data loss, I would uninstal XP, and re-install through W98 as a multi-boot sys and let XP install it`s own boot manager. BTW, not necesarry to dual boot with 2 drives, just different partitions.

Also, you should never slave CD/CDR-W/DVD to the hardrive. Master/slave the HDs on the primary IDE and the opticals on the secondary.

Another quick thought, the second\slave drive does not have to be partitioned as primary, extended partition will work fine and help keep drive letter assignments less confusing.

[gladiator]

I had a similar problem as this using a master HD from another system and trying to use it as a secondary with out losing the info on the HD. it would not boot up So I hooked it up as a Master and I went into MSCONFIG and disabled the MBR, then I hooked it up as a secondary again and it booted up fine with no problem since, if i ever want to use it as a master again I'll just reinable the MBR.

[ranger_cole]

Yes I did keep the win 98 drive in the computer as a slave when I installed windows.

[andyms18a]

if you kept the 98drive as a slave it became d to winxp but it is still an activ driv with a bootsector and the new drive xp instaled on is allso an active brive with a bootsector you can only have one drive set to activ with a bootsector to fix your prob put the win98 hd in as master the winxp in as slave boot with awin98 flopy at the a prompt type fdisk change to the new hdd and deleat the partition then reboot with the winxp cd and install on the d drive have the winxp setup partition and format the drive also i wood uninstall the nicklock prog first as winxp will use its own boot manager