My computer won’t boot. I get the blue screen of death on startup. This is the error I get, although I am not installing anything - I’m just booting. The specific parameter I get is 0x00000002, that is:
It appears to have something to do with my second hard drive, which is about 3 months old. If I disable it by detaching the power from it, the computer boots, although XP wants to do a chkdsk on my main drive.
I’ve checked all the cables, they’re tight.
I’ve tried disabling ASPI in the BIOS. When I do that, it hangs on startup (it gets to the point where it tells me windows shut down badly, and do I want to run in safe mode. I say no, just boot, and it just sits there forever.)
Are we talking ASPI or ACPI? Both are valid acronyms and are very different.
I’m going to assume ACPI as it’s more likely.
Is your second drive PATA / IDE or SATA? (Big ribbon cable or slim plastic cable) If the former, are both drives jumpered correctly (master / slave / cable select)? If the latter, try plugging it in to a different SATA socket; also try a different SATA cable.
If you’ve done all that, try resetting the ESCD (?) in your BIOS. This will reinitialise the data area Windows is trying to read.
Second drive is SATA. I finally did get it to boot by swapping what I assume are the drive controller cables - I pulled them both out of the motherboard and switched 'em around.
I think I still get the chkdsk on startup - I’m doing a full backup of my second drive at the moment, so I can’t double check that. But I was getting it every time. How do I make that go away?
It’s actually only checking the data partition on my primary drive. I have it partitioned into 3 partitions - C: is the OS, D: is a data partition, and E: is the pagefile. It only wants to check D:
I did reboot, and it wants to check D: again. I’ll go ahead and let it, but boy, it’s going to get old if it wants to do this every time I reboot.
Aha! What you’ve probably got here is a partition relabelling issue. Each of your drives has a primary partition. Your first hard drive also has an extended partition. Windows assigns drive letters first to primary partitions, and then to extended partitions. So when you only had the first drive in, you happily had C: and D:, but when you put the second drive in, that became the new D:, and the old D: became E:!
