wont boot with 2 HDD's

first of all this is a desktop but there isnt much traffic over on DTR so ill post here to see if anyone knows what happening...

i have a fairly old (2003/4) tower and im trying to get it running with a second HDD for either dual boot or data either way dosnt matter atm but every time i connect two at the same time i end up at a screen saying

'reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key'

now they are IDE HDD's and i have set all the jumpers right and it still isnt working. ive tried to reinstall but i get an error saying there is no disk etc etc the same goes for diskcfg etc etc from the xp cd...

anyone got any ideas on what i can do?

thanks
mtarm1

 

You may have already done this, just check the IDE cable attachment once more to ensure that primary goes to the primary and the secondary to the secondary. I know that it mostly counts if the jumpers are on cable select, but something things go awry if the attachments are opposite to what the jumpers are configured to.

Cheers mate!

 

yep done that cos i also tried cable select which didnt work either...

could it maybe be a chipset limitation? because both had xp on them and both worked seperatly on the same config but when i tried to dual boot them and also wipped one and tried to use it as a data hdd it didnt work either so its defs not the hdd's

 

It could be the IDE ribbon cable attachments. You could rule that out as well. I had the exact problem with my IDE ribbon cable, so I used the other IDE cable from my optical drive channel to test it out. Sure enough, things started working fine after that.

 

NBR is currently closed for desktop related questions/comments. Please make a new thread over at Desktopreview.com
If your thread doesn't get a response in a reasonable amount of time, we can reopen this thread(afterall patience is a virtue).

 

Could try cable select too.