Be Excellent To Each Other

I've got a dodgy hard drive which is causing crashes. It's not the boot drive but its presence seemingly makes things go wrong.

However if I remove it, the PC won't boot.

Anyone know of anything I can do about it?

Does the PC tell you why it won't boot?

I believe one thing it complains of if I take it out is 'wrong disk'. Also sometimes the disk is just simply disc read error. It seemingly matters not that it is not the disk I'm supposed to boot from.

If your machine won't boot when you remove what should be a non-boot disk then there must be something at the OS level configured to look to that disk. The only things that comes to mind at that level that you can move off the OS disk is (a) page file and (b) user folders i.e My Documents. I wouldn't have expected either of those not being found would cause such a catastrophic failure but you never know and it's worth ruling out.

You don't mention which version of Windows you're running but there's instructions here for XP on how to move the page file to a different partition here so just look at that:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886

Moving My Documents is done like this so have a read of that:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310147

I'd also go into the BIOS and check the various settings in there and just make sure nothing is pointing to or expecting the secondary disk to be present.

Rather than try and work out all the possible problems. If you have another disk available, just clone the failing disk, swap it out and carry on with your life

Sounds like the Master Boot Record is on the wrong disk.

Something something windows repair, something something FIXMBR

I was thinking mbr. The failing disk is a disk is one which has had operating system on it previously which is probably where the trouble lies.

I don't think I could clone the disk though, it's just in too bad a state now.