Phew - that was close!

[puggit]

Have been playing around with my harddrives (I have 3) purely in a software sense (no fiddling with wires). I have a now empty drive (formatted+partitioned) as slave on 1st IDE cable. All was fine yesterday during reboots after re-lettering drives etc.

Today I try to boot up and it hangs after checking the CD drive for a bootable CD.

I had a hunch, removed the aforementioned empty drive from the IDE cable, and I'm up...

All drives are various Maxtor, all have worked fine until now. Any ideas?

(I have a good backup, so no real worries).

[JamieBeeston]

sounds like a boot order issue.

With the CD rom in, it might have clashed with the HDD, and resulted in it falling off the Bios, and as such it couldnt boot.

Typically, every boot device will be exhausted, so that fact it wasnt.. speaks volumes

[puggit]

Sorry - confusing post. It was the HDD I removed - the CD drive was empty at all times.

CD drive is on 2nd IDE with another HDD which works fine.

So:

IDE1
Master - boot/system HDD
Slave - problem HDD
IDE2
Master - CD-ROM
Slave - HDD