Removeable hard drive and no boot

[lohearn]

My computer at work has a removeable hard drive in it. It's a CRU dataport setup. Windows XP seems to hate the thing but I can't remove it. When I remove the drive windows XP pro simply will not boot up. It give some error messsage about mount boot drive or something and goes nowhere.

No, XP Pro is not in any way installed to the removeable drive. The drive is empty, no files on it at all. The strange thing about the drive though is it can't be formatted? I went into disk manager and you can not format the drive.

Does anyone have any experience with these drives? I don't need it anymore, I want it out of the system, but XP Pro won't let me. The drive was originally installed in my old computer. Got the new computer, set it up, shut it down, installed the removable hard drive in it, rebooted and XP Pro crashed. If I hadn't needed the files on it I never would have installed it in the first place. XP crashed when the drive was installed and now I can't uninstall the drive.

Completely frustrating.

[Bill in SD, CA]

Just a shot in the dark here but maybe if you delete the drivers for the drive and then restart XP won't be looking for it.

I'd also check in the BIOS on restart and make sure everything looks right without the drive.

Bill

[lohearn]

Hi again,

A few times I have disconnected the drive, gone into the BIOS and the drive is not listed. Boot to wondows and get the stupid boot volume error. How would I remove drivers for it from windows? Just go to remove hardware and delete the thing, shut down, physically disconnect it, and then boot back into windows?

[Bill in SD, CA]

First I would go into Device Manager and verify what you are going to remove.

Then do what you said.

Bill

[lohearn]

Went into device manager, removed the drive. Logged off XP Pro (shutdown) and physically disconnected the stupid hard drive. Go to boot up, NOTHING! Still hangs and tells me to reboot and select the proper boot device. BIOS is fine, the drive is not listed there. So IDE 0 has just the normal hard drive on it, IDE 2 had my two CD drives. Checked the boot devices, all were listed properly. Boot again, same error message. GRRRRRRRRRR.

Stupid drive, I hate it.

[Rmcky]

Just a shot in the dark here, but try going into services and disable Volume Shadow Copy service and indexing. If that allows you to remove the drive, then you should be able to reenable them afterwards.

Rick

[lohearn]

Okay, I now know why I have been unable to remove the removable hard drive. My boot records are on drive D!!! Why in the world would windows install the boot records to drive D?

Now I have to find a way to get windows to switch my boot records from drive D to drive C where they belong.