Slow PC boot after hdd removal

Ive been tackling this situation for a while and i cant figure it out.


I have an Asus p4p800 e deluxe mobo
p4 3.0 ghz processor
1gb of memory
nvida geforce fx 5500 video card
a 40 gb hdd on the primary ide(master)
120gb(slave)
and a 200gb on the primary sata


About a month ago i removed one of my hdd (maxtor 120gb ide) because i wanted to transfer it to another computer. After i removed it, my pc took longer than usual to boot. I put the drive back in and the pc booted normally. I pulled it out yet again and the same thing happens.

I left it in and cant figure it out for shit.

anyone have any advice?

 

You say takes longer to boot
How Long?
In Bios set the HDD you have your OS on to Boot first.

 

its set to boot from the primary hdd and it takes over 2 min to boot. before the removal it took less than a min

 

how would i go about trying to fix that?

 

anyone have any type of help for me?

 

marcopolo's guess looks like a good one. If it's on the money, you might put the hard drive back in your system, and uninstall any software that was installed to the drive you want to remove. Then remove the drive, and re-install the software to a drive that is still in your system.

If it's just a question of data files on the removed drive that software installed on the remaining drive is looking for, just change the settings in each affected program so that the software doesn't look for its data files on a drive that isn't there.

You might also try running a registry cleaner like CCleaner, in the hope that Windows is stumbling on a Registry reference to the missing drive, and that the registry cleaner can identify and remove that reference for you. MG has it at <http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4191.html>.

 

ok ill try that one out and see what happens. thanks for the help. i really appreciate it

 

did you scrub the removed drive info from the BIOS
if the drive info is still in the bios then the os is looking for that drive when the system boots
its not there so os will hang for a bit
just a thought

 

i am a complete idiot....maybe removing the battery would fix it....

 

If what you want to fix is the BIOS entries for your hard drive -- removing the CMOS battery will fix that, all right, but it will also delete the entries for the remaining hard drives. With that gone, your system may not be able to access any hard drive, never mind boot from it.

Better to go into the BIOS setup and attend to the hard drive settings directly. While you're in there, make a note of the settings for both drives before you change anything. You may have to restore them some day, and if you don't know what the settings should be, you may have a real problem if they're non-standard for the drive(s) you have installed.

If they're set to "Auto", the BIOS will interrogate the hard drive and make its own settings as needed. Leave that be for any drive that is still installed. Just change the absent drive setting to "None" so the BIOS won't hang itself up trying to interrogate a drive that isn't there.

 

i still havent been able to fix the slow boot....now ive got even more problems.

The 120gb hdd that i wanted to use is stuck at only being able to see 33gb. i formatted to ntfs and it wont budge....

and to make matters even worse the pc is randomly rebooting. i have plenty of cooling so i dont think it is the heat

any help would be appreciated

 

Did you re-partition the drive before you re-formatted to NTFS?

 

i did, and i made an ntfs partition too....maybe i should try fdisk