XP will not boot when an optical drive has been detached

[jay73]

I have been running XP 64 for several months but now it will not boot anymore whenever I remove at least one of my optical drives.

This quirk has been annoying me ever since I had to reinstall last week after trying to get AHCI activated on my SATA drives. That did not work but it worked well enough to make XP unbootable. So I had no choice but to reinstall (recovery simply failed). And then I installed a second time because it still did not boot; only at this point did it occur to me that I had detached one of the optical drives after the first install - problems solved, I thought... :lol:

It is kind of weird that this never happened before. As I have a few Linux distributions on this pc that are not supported by the onboard IDE , I have constantly had at least one drive attached to a separate IDE controller card (that XP does not see (32 bit card, this XP does not accept 32 bit drivers)- or rather, it did not until I reinstalled ).

I am perfectly sure that BIOS is exactly as it was before my unfortunate AHCI experiment.

Could this have anything to do with some sort of misconfiguration during reinstall? Or with that controller card that suddenly did appear under XP ? Come to that, it is also perplexing that XP should see the PATA drive connected to this card but not any optical drive.