Can't remove hard drive.

[Marmaduke]

I'm having a weird problem. Running Windows 98se. Have 12Gig Primary Master and 10Gig Primary Slave. The slave drive is for data storage. I tried removing the slave drive over the weekend and am having problems. I moved all the data from the slave to the master. All that was left on the slave drive was Norton protected files from the trash can. I turned off computer, physically removed drive, then turned on computer. I got an error message about Boot disk failure, insert system disk. Plugging in the secondary lets me boot with no problems. I don't get it. How can I physically remove the secondary drive? And I did remove the right drive.

[harry12]

Does your motherboard BIOS still think the disc is there? -Is it shown present/greyed under My Computer?
Is this on an older motherboard, perhaps - - -?
In yr System-list you show 300G drive and 2gig memory - can this be running Win98SE? This site has been experiencing (Win98SE-)problems with RAM over 512M and Hdds over 137G.....unless you have a couple of patrches that folk have heard-about but don't have (it seems).
Good luck, you don't say "why" you wanted to put yr data and OS on one HDD - can u explaiin the logic....
"If a fix works - don't touch it"

[Marmaduke]

Originally Posted by harry12

Does your motherboard BIOS still think the disc is there? -Is it shown present/greyed under My Computer?
Is this on an older motherboard, perhaps - - -?
In yr System-list you show 300G drive and 2gig memory - can this be running Win98SE? This site has been experiencing (Win98SE-)problems with RAM over 512M and Hdds over 137G.....unless you have a couple of patrches that folk have heard-about but don't have (it seems).
Good luck, you don't say "why" you wanted to put yr data and OS on one HDD - can u explaiin the logic....
"If a fix works - don't touch it"

The Windows 98 computer has an old Aopen motherboard. I'm going to say 6+ yrs. (I'll try the bios thing when I get home from work.)

My sig is not related to this problem. Ignore sig. Have "old" computer in basement I'm puttering around with.

Why??? I needed an extra hard drive to try to install Vista. I am thinking 10Gigs might be too small, but I started removing the hard drive first before thinking about it.

[TopFarmer]

check the jumper on the Master hdd, some drives "WD" there is a jumper for Master with Slave and a different one for Master alone.