Hi, and thanks in advance for any help to this problem!

Had one maxtor SATA 80gb drive working on a Asus A8N SLI SE motherboard, with a copy of XP home on it.. I'm now upgrading the computer, and put an extra 1gb of ram into it as well as a secondary seagate 250gb hard drive.

Drive installed easily, recognized immidiately, and format+bios style file copying went smoothly .. But when I turned it back on, it acted as if the drive had no operating system on it and went streight to the XP CD boot!

After trying a few different things, I booted off the XP pro cd and went into the recovery console, accessed d:\... (c:\ being the original 80gb hard drive) and put in "DIR D:\" to find out what was on the hard drive. To which I am now looking at

"The volume in drive D has no label".. followed by readings of no data on it whatsoever.


How has this happened? Is there a problem with any drivers or configurations that would inhibit the install or hard drive function at all?

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Also, when I boot off the original 80gb hard drive, I now get the error

"windows root\system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupt, please re-install."

All the data's there, and after trawling on google, there's various web pages explaining what happens to cause this error message. Most useful as it's directed to users who have happened to them on a clean install is: http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_haldll_missing.htm

It's pretty easy to fix by pretty much just replacing/adding the file from the XP cd from within windows, google searches have revealed.. So i'm not in danger not being able to access the data from it, right?!



Any replies appreciated!


-MeMe

Some help on this one can also be found HERE.

It sounds as if the system looked at the newly added drive upon bootup for the OS, and couldn't find it. There should be settings in the BIOS for selecting which drive to boot from, usually called 'Boot order'. Make sure that is correct. This should be done with both drives connected, as I've seen the setting change just from connecting a second drive, even though the BIOS was never accessed.

Hi there.. Quick followup (sorry to revive a dead post) for people who may be having the same problem:

The problem was a setting in the BIOS, had to change the disk size to LRGE (or large, similar) from AUTO..

Hi MeMe,

Thanks for the feedback. It may help others in a near future.

Chris