adding 2nd hdd screws up main hdd OS

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dadsbiz

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Hi guys I am having a heck of a time with this my desktop i use for everything recently died the cpu or motherboard is bad im not sure which. Anyhow i went and dug out my old emachine and stuck the mobo into the case this one was in. I hooked everything up the way i had it on my athlon with the 80gb as the primary and the 300gb as my secondary went to reinstall windows and at the point that xp restarts your system the first time it would get to the place where it asks if you want to boot from the cd and it nevers goes into the windows installation screen from there. I took the 300gb off the cable and restarted and it and it installed windows like usual. so my next step was to restart with the 300gb hooked back to it and it went to a blinking cursor in the top left of the screen but never showed me the windows xp loading screen. I then took it back off and tried to reboot with just the 80gb and it gave me operating system not found. I tried going into fixboot and fixmbr and those didnt help me. so i reinstalled windows again it worked fine and then i put in my siig ata card and thought maybe it would work if i put my 300gb on the siig card instead of on the board. well thats when i got the black cursor again and windows wouldnt load. I took the 300gb off the ata card and tried to reboot with the 80gb like normal and wouldnt ya know it i got the operating system not found error once again i just got done reloading windows again and now im looking for some help before i attempt to make this work again because these windows installs are getting old at 30-40 mins a pop. Please tell me someone can help me with this or knows what could be the problem. I am about ready to say screw it and throw this in the trash.
 
The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is that your PSU is underpowered and is causing your system be unstable after the last drive is plugged in. How many watts is the PSU you are using? Do you have one you can switch out that has a higher wattage ratting?
 
the board and processor are out of a model T1742 its a celeron 1.7 ghz with 384 mb ram the case is a alienware with a 550 watt power supply I dont think its a power supply issue because i had the sempron 3000+ that i had in this case hooked to it with the same 80gb hdd the same 300gb and a second 300gb run through the siig card and a dvd rom drive and a dvd burner all hooked to it and it handled that fine. I havent tried starting it without the ide connected because of that but i still dont see why it would cause the OS to not be shown.
 
Ok now ive got an update for you guys it is not putting the 2nd hdd onto the system that is making it happen it seems that was just a coincidence. It is giving the Operating system not found error now and all we did was restart the system it was about the 2nd or 3rd restart when it happens. I have tried the fixmbr and fixboot and still it does it.
 
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I got it fixed I found the problem and fixed it just now i tried putting both the 80gb and the 300gb onto the siig card and it gave me a different message saying the system couldnt boot with that configuration to refer to the windows manual. When i saw this i got the crazy idea to put the dvd burner and dvd rom onto the siig card and hook the 2 hdd onto the other ide on the board as soon as i did that and fired it up it works and shows both hdd and both dvd drives. so the issue is either the IDE port on the board or the cable i was using to hook the hard drives up. the reason i posted this is so that if someone else gets this problem they know to check changing the cables to the other slots.
 
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