Arghhh!!! Think I killed my computer.

[wwaag]

Decided to do a clean install of XP. I use a mobile HDD rack so I put in a clean system drive so I could switch back and forth until I'm happy with the new install. Anyway, there is a 2nd HDD which contains data. For the initial install, XP decided it needed to do a chkdsk on one partition of my 2nd HDD. Continuous errors. Anyway, I foolishly decided to turn the system off and remove the 2nd HDD. Did so, and now it hangs during the initial boot where it searches to disk drives. Tried the old system drive--same result. I now get a solid tone rather than the usual beeps. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

wwaag

[ybeard]

You sure when you pulled that second drive out that your BIOS still expects it to be there and is doing retries attempting to find it? In other words, you have to define in BIOS setup how many hard disks you have connected. If you remove one of them and don't put another in its place, it'll sit there with a blank screen attempting to "find" it and eventually error out.

[wwaag]

No, that's not it. One of the first things I tried was to re-connect the 2nd HDD. Same thing. At least I did a complete backup before this fiasco. I've tried the hard drives on another machine and they are OK. Thanks for the reply.

wwaag

[wwaag]

Crisis over!! For whatever reason, it is now working again. The constant tone was a fan warning since I had disconnected one when removing the hard drives.

wwaag