i am attempting to install my laptop hard drive as a second drive in my old pc, i have used an adapter and ide cable with extra connector however when i start up it sometimes works ok and other times wont start and asks for a boot disk. as this was in my laptop it still has windows operating system installed, could this be complicating things and if so how do i get rid of it.

Hi dingdongdo, welcome to itsallPC

The issue you describe doesn't really add up, so we're going to need to clarify some issues. Please supply a little more information on your system, including the Window version you're using and a full list of your HDDs and optical drives.

Please read this post, to understand the sort of information we require. Note that every board has a post entitled "Read this before posting".

i am using an old pc with windows xp home sp2, i have 2 optical drives, (1 dvd rom and 1 cd-rw). both optical drives are on one ide ribbon and i am trying to run the 2 hard drives on another ribbon. i have set the jumpers on my original hd to master and the second to slave. my original (master is a seagate 10g, second is a 2.5 samsung 40g). maybe its a bad connection on the adapter plug but sometimes my system asks for a boot diskette.

hope this helps, thanks.

I sounds like you might be getting a channel conflict with your Hard Disk Drives that is causing neither drive to detect, or just one.

Depending on your mini-IDE adapters, you may need to fiddle with the jumpers. I have seen mini-IDE adapters that have override jumpers that can cause problems when the HDD itself is set to a channel.

It might help if you could take a picture of the adapter, and supply details on the HDD.