Hello everyone. Thank you for LOOKING at my NEW problem.

I went to boot up the AMD Athalon 1500+, it has WIN XP PRO with 2 gig ram. There are four hard drives installed, and this is what it shows me (see photo below).

The boot sequence comes up slowly and the drives are;
Primary Master ST3250620A 3.AAD ,
Primary Slave however displays as some cryptic lettering cdc cdcocbc- and so on (obviously this is the problem),
Secondary Master Pioneer,
Secondary Slave ST320014A 3.07.

So my question is, If the secondary drive is corrupted how come it wont boot up to windows?
The O/S is on the ST3250620A.

[attachment deleted by admin]Well I took the obvious step and removed the drive I thought was creating the problem, with good results.

NOT GREAT but gooder !!!

So now booting up I get to recognizing the drives, and starts to go to the windows logging on screen but it just goes black with a blinking curser in the top left corner.

Maybe I should take out another drive.you can try typing in blackscreen in search box above for some tips ! good luck..Thanks mr tee, for haveing a look.
One of the items in there actually sounds exactly like my situation.
Unfortunately it is from a guest and doesnt have any reply.
I'll keep doing some research. If you can get into safe mode and get to the command prompt and run Chkdsk you should be able to fix any file system errors. 

chkdsk (drive) /F......with a space between the drive letter and the slash.....and no brackets.You're always getting yourself in trouble 


The first prob which you fixed seemed to be something worse then a drive failure- a Drive Logic board failure. I assume you removed the Primary Slave>

As the screen states you could get a 80-conductor cable for your secondary IDE drives. Sometimes that can cause issues.


But- likely it is just the Primary Slave Jumpering. Some drives have a separate setting for Master With Slave and a Master Without slave, so you'd need to switch to without slave (obviously).Thanks Karnac, if I can just get it to the safe mode area you might be right. Sometimes it gets as far as the windows boot screen but then it locks up.

BC_Programmer, yes I removed that drive and it seemed to settle down a bit.
(still no joy yet though).

I used that drive to fix another computer but the jumpers havent changed (at least I cant remember CHANGING them) and then I put it back in. ( but thats when the fan died).

I thought it was all overheating issues. Apparently not.
Its aWestern Digital so no jumpers is slave.
I'll dig around inside and see what happens.
Thanks for the help. ImnoGuruI'm just wondering if we're looking too hard at the harddrive problem when it might be bad memory, or maybe it just needs reseating a couple of times to remove any oxidation on the contacts. Try running one stick and see if it will boot.Thanks Karnac, actually that is exactly what I am going to do tommorrow.
Tha case has been open for some time now, it might just be a simple thing.
(Hopefully)  Check that ribbon cables integrity while you're in there.......maybe swap it out for known good one.....with 4 HDs in there things must be pretty tight and that can cause them to crack after time from movement and heat.  SUCCESS

Well, all things bright and beautiful.

I took it all apart and cleaned and scrubbed and vacuumed, removed this bit and then that one and put it all back together again.

First action on reboot.... SMOOTH as silk to the log onscreen... password OK and in as normal.  
Minus one drive and C:Drive with everything in tact. 

Thank you one and all for your input ImnoGuru. Well done......Surprising how a stripdown/rebuild can put things back on track......as long as you don't end up with extra parts..... There was this one item left over.... Hahaha

trouble is of course I changed so many things in there and refitted them, that I dont know what the cause was.

Anyway at this point it doesnt really matter.
Thanks for the help Karnac