Holy Shit!
 

Im in pc crisis mode again! I just went through the most horrible computer experience ever. I was installing a M-Audio Revo and accidentally unplugged the hard drive from the controller pci card. I booted up without noticing and it said Operating system not found. Alright, no big deal, i figured i could just plug it back in, NOOOOOOOOO! I booted up again and right before windows was to begin loading, it just froze, nothing, nada, I couldn't do anything to fix it. So, hours later: I got a stroke of genius and decided to plug in an old 4GB hard drive and boot off of that. I worked, so i plugged the 20GB back in with it and installed WinXp onto the 20GB. So Im thinking everything is peachy until i realize that i can't unplug the 4GB without it saying "NTblah blah is missing, CNTR-Alt-Del to restart" So i plug to 4GB back in and start feeling happy, UNTIL, i realize that its running at half the speed it was without the 4GB drive in there. Something about it using 40 conductor cables instead of 80. I have no idea how to get rid of the 4GB and get the 20GB running faster. What do i do?! It takes 30 minutes to rip a cd on fast with Monkey Audio! 25 minutes to install a game, its horrible, everything is slow. The only good news is the Revo works perfectly.

That's nice, dear.

What? Did i come off as sounding like a whiny three year old? Well, anyway, i really need help with this one. Atmo, where are you? Your a genius i need your help.

Ok, by the sounds of it, the old 4gb drive isnt a udma33/66 (or dma isnt enabled) and if it's on the same cable as the 20gb drive, the 20gb drive will be bottlenecked by the slower drive. Since most drives of that age should be able to do udma33 at least, my guess is it isnt enabled.

Solution 1: Enable udma, or put the 4gb drive on another ide channel. This will allow your 20gb drive to use udma66/100, and should restore your speed loss (udma will still need to be enabled).

Normally, when you're using the onboard ide controller, you enable udma in the bios. Since you're using a pci card you'll have to dig up the manual to find out how.

Solution 2: Remove the 4gb drive altogether, and reinstall windows.

The reason it wont boot to windows with the 4gb drive removed is because it's obviously put the boot loader on the 4gb drive. If you reinstall windows with the 4gb drive removed it'll be fine. That's the option i'd take, as if for any reason the 4gb drive fails, you wont be able to boot back into windows without a 3rd party boot loader so you can back up your data before re-installing.

Sorry for taking so long to reply, i'm in the process of building a new pc at the moment.

[edit]Just re-read your post.

You'll need to use an 80wire ata66/100 cable to get max performance from your drive, as the older 40wire cables only have a maximum throughput of 33MB/sec.

Well i've never changed the cables, so it shouldn't be any slower than it was. Unless its one of the problems you said. I ran the xp cd off of the 4GB drive, and installed onto the 20GB drive. Is that why the "Boot Loader" is on the 4GB drive? Well, the reason the boot loader is on the 4GB is because i couldn't get the 20GB to work after my little mishap. My question is though, how do i remove the 4GB drive before i reinstall? If i remove it, i get an error and can't run windows. I'll look for the DMA thing just incase thats the problem.

Oops, maybe i read your post wrong. Do you mean i need an 80 IDE cable or a new power cable? I think i know why its so slow. I had to pull a few cables off the old computer to hook both drives up, they must be 40's instead of an 80. I'll check that out, i wanted to post first incase i don't come back.;)

Well it turns out that the 80 was on the 4GB and the 40 on the 20GB. But for some reason when i switch them around, it gives me the operating system not found error. It tries to detect Ultra66 and ultimately says its not installed. So i swiched the cables back and i can get back into windows. Why can't i switch the cables around? Should i get another 80 cable and hook them both up with 80's? (Or will i get the error again?)

I don't know how to fix your problem, but let me just say this, I feel your pain.

I've been in situations like yours many times. You have my simpathy :D

It'll be worth it. The Revo is a SUPERB card.

Well i got everything working, including the Revo, the hard drive is just half as fast as it was before.
Edit: and the Revo is a million times cleaner than my Live Value. :D

Well this sure was a waste of time. I had the fucking cable backwards, and it FIT. The IDE cables aren't supposed to fit both ways, yet it did, and it messed me up. I swiched the cables and put the 40 in the right direction, boom, it works. I feel like an idiot(no offence to Idiot) and because the cable was BACKWARDS! Sorry for wasting anyone's time. I'll go shoot myself now..:rolleyes:

lol. i love it when theres a simple solution i overlooked. then i get to feel good about finding it all by myself. :)

Well at least i found it. If someone had told me, "Turn the plug around", i would have really shot myself.:igor:

emmm * Turn The plug around* :D





















Well you knew some ejit would say it just had to be me did'nt it ;) :D

Red stripe always goes twards the molex power connector.

I still have one other problem. Im still booting through the 4GB drive, and i can't remove it without error and endless restarts. How do i get rid of the 4Gb while still being able to access Xp on the 20GB?

Remove the 4gb, boot off the xp cd, and do a repair install over the top of the old one. Back up all your important stuff first though.

Change jumpers. put the 20 GB on the very end of the EIDE cable and set the jumper to MASTER. put 4 GB on the middle connector on the EIDE cable, and set jumper to SLAVE.

if it says that files are missing, something that can cause that is changing the drive letter than XP is installed on. it doesn't like that.

looking at your newer posts, i think this is your problem. when you remove the smaller drive, it changes the drive letter of the XP one, which in turn cocks everything up. my workaround was to reinstall win2k, although i'm sure you don't wanna do that.

if thats so, use a boot disk and go into FDISK and change the active drive. Whatever drive (or partiton) you set active, becomes C:

the problem is that the smaller drive will be denoted C:. when you disconnect it, the next drive in the heirarchy becomes C: (the naming is automatic), in this case the winXP one. since winXP was installed when it was still D: or whatever, hell proceeds to break loose. i think there's programs you can get to edit it, possibly.

This may be the problem, your right. WinXp is installed on D: now. I hope somebody knows a program to change this, because i have no idea. I do not have a boot disk, is there a way to create one?

Just boot from the winxp cd.

Or go to bootdisk.com and download the files you need to make one.