Installing Hard Drive Causes Corruption

[Shanerox]

Greetings! So here's the deelio. I have this old IDE 100 GB hard drive used only for storage, so it has no OS on it. I wanted to stick it in my new HP Vista SP1 machine. So I got the IDE cables, screwed it in, made sure it was on slave, and plugged it in. To an only minor surprise, when I turned on the computer, it said a windows file was either missing or corrupted. So I unplugged the hard drive and turned it on again, and here I am typing you this question. Now this isn't the first time this has happened. I put it in an old HP Windows XP Media machine and it did the same. But the info on that computer didn't matter so I reinstalled windows and went on my merry way. In this case, however, I do not wish to do so.

Now I am not a computer whiz, but I know a thing or two. I'm pretty sure that to install just another hard drive, it's gotta be in the slave config, but please correct me if I'm wrong. And feel free to enlighten me a bit on Hard Drives, installing them, and all that nice stuff, I do enjoy learning. On the XP Media computer it was just in the default not Master or Slave or Master with Slave configuration, the weird named one.

Oh yes. And I love you. Have a splendid day

[Ant]

You don't mention if it booted ok before the error was reported, which suggests some kind of conflict, or failed during bootup, which would suggest it's trying to boot to the data drive with no OS on it.

You said you got the IDE cables and attached it. Are you attaching it to a secondary IDE socket, not the same ribbon cable the Boot Drive is on?

If so attach it to the same ribbon cable as the Boot Drive, with the Boot Drive as the last one on the ribbon cable. Check your jumper settings again, slave/master respectively and again that the boot drive hasn't got a "Master with Slave" jumper setting.

Check your bios for drive recognition/boot order priority too.

[Shanerox]

Sorry for my lack of information.

The only time I ever got this error was when I plugged in the hard drive. Before I plugged it in and after I unplugged it everything was dandy. As for the boot hard drive, it is a SATA hard drive, so it doesn't even have an IDE ribbon. I have only ever worked with IDE hard drives, so if there is something different about using the two together, I am ignorant to it.

[Ant]

Set the jumper on the IDE drive to master rather than slave and check in the bios that your sata drive is recognised as such and has boot priority.

[Shanerox]

Thank you very much good sir. Everything is running beautifully, and I will never forget your advice