Problems with 160gig hdd

[hedge]

Ok i've got a western digital 160gig hard drive thats causing me a few headaches.
Whenever anything tries to access the drive (its not set as my boot drive, just got a whole heap of videos on there), like for instance at startup, i hear this high pitched kinda noise. Hard to describe, but its definitely coming from the hard drive. Fair enough, i figure, I'll backup the vids and take it back.
But the problem is now everytime i try and remove the hard drive from the computer, the computer comes close to crashing at the bios check for the hard drives, where it should only be picking up my western digital 80 gig, which is and has worked fine for over a year. After about 2 minutes, bios finally passes, with the correct hard drive being recognised. But now it won't boot into windows, giving one of those system disc errors. What the hell?
The drive with windows on it is still there, and if i reconnect the 160gig, bios is passed in a split second, and windows boots without any problems.
I've tried changing IDE cables, and changing the boot drive to anything i could think of in the bios, but even if it would boot eventually, that still doesnt explain the stupidly slow bios check.

[Rex_Mundi_Incarnit]

Somehow you managed to get your master boot record for windows on your 160GB disc, making the other one unbootable. Dont bother with the 160GB drive, leave it out. Then manually setup your other harddisc in the bios. Check how many heads and cylinders it has. Make sure its primary master and that the first boot device is CD-ROM, then IDE0.Then reboot the computer with the windows xp cd-rom in the cd-rom drive. Windows install will initiate if your windows cd-rom is bootable. When everything finished loading enter the recovery console by pressing R. Log into windows and execute the programme that fixes the master boot record (MBR). I cant remember what its called but you can type 'help' or something similar and you get a whole list of commands you can execute. Look for the command that refers to fixing the MBR. Once you done that, remove the cd-rom and reboot. Everything should work fine now.

[hedge]

Somehow you managed to get your master boot record for windows on your 160GB disc, making the other one unbootable. Dont bother with the 160GB drive, leave it out. Then manually setup your other harddisc in the bios. Check how many heads and cylinders it has. Make sure its primary master and that the first boot device is CD-ROM, then IDE0.Then reboot the computer with the windows xp cd-rom in the cd-rom drive. Windows install will initiate if your windows cd-rom is bootable. When everything finished loading enter the recovery console by pressing R. Log into windows and execute the programme that fixes the master boot record (MBR). I cant remember what its called but you can type 'help' or something similar and you get a whole list of commands you can execute. Look for the command that refers to fixing the MBR. Once you done that, remove the cd-rom and reboot. Everything should work fine now.
Thanks for ya help Rex! I'll print this off and get to it!

[hedge]

Thanks for ya help Rex! I'll print this off and get to it!
Ok got it working again, but it was nothing complex in the end, just a bad jumper setting on the 80gb. It was set to Master w/ slave present! *sighs*
Ah well thanks again for your help rex, you truly are the forums hardware man :cool:

[collector]

Log into windows and execute the programme that fixes the master boot record (MBR). I cant remember what its called but you can type 'help' Look for the command that refers to fixing the MBR. Once you done that, remove the cd-rom and reboot. Everything should work fine now.

Sub-answer to the already solved problem: :)

fixmbr to repair the mbr
fixboot to repair the boot-sector
bootcfg /rebuild to repair a damaged boot.ini

P.