2nd hard drive install IDE problem

this weekend i was helping my girlfriend's little brother (galen) install a new hard drive so he could dual boot fedora core 3 and windows xp pro. he's a smart guy, great visual basic programmer, so i thought it would be real good for him to get into linux. after my recent install of fedora core 3, which went very smoothly, i figured it would be a couple hours and we would be up and running. wrong. he bought his computer off tiger direct as a barebone system, then added what was needed. it's a intel celeron 1.5 i think, 256 mb ram, etc. i'm not sure who, if it was tiger direct, or galen that was the one who put the machine together, but it wasnt how i think it should be. the dvd rom drive was the master over the hard drive (win xp), same IDE cable, and then the floppy drive had its own IDE cable. so, luckily i had brought an extra cable, so we could hook everything up. i used the same IDE cable for both hard drives (he had a 40 gb for xp, i added a 20gb for linux) setting the xp drive as the master, the linux drive as the slave. then i put the dvd and floppy drives on the same ide cable. i then booted the system. made sure bios was reading the new drive, that was all good, then booted again, and got an error on boot. i can't remember the exact error, but was something like this.

Code:

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Floppy drive(s) failure (40) No IDE channel 80 conductor

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it wouldn't boot to cd, floppy, or existing windows hard drive. any ideas on the problem?

Windows is still thinking it is on the slave drive. You will need to use the XP install cd, type "R" for repair, and when you get the command prompt, type FIXMBR. That should put ntldr where it needs to be.

You stll need to do this, even though hen you install FC3, and you install grub to the MBR. Grub moves ntldr or something like that, I am not exactly sure. But Grub is booting ntldr, not Windows. Ntldr will still be booting Windows.

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Originally Posted by budman7

Grub moves ntldr or something like that, I am not exactly sure.

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ntldr, to my knowledge, actually resides in the boot sector of the windows partition. The MBR just contains simple code to load that boot sector.

Do you have a normal floppy drive or an IDE floppy drive ? If you have a normal one, it should be connected to its own floppycontroller using a special cable. I think it doesn't boot to the point where you can actually enter something using a keyboard. If you are using an IDE floppydrive it needs a different IDE cable, not an ATA66 cable I guess. At least that is what I understand from this message.

its an IDE floppy drive. ill give the xp repair a try

The problem is probably your cabling. Sounds like you've got 40 wire and 80 wire cables mixed up and going to the wrong controller.

i am going to get different calbes and try that. i said i was going to do the win xp repair, but i remembered that isnt possible since it won't boot to anything. thanks for all your help.