PC won't boot after unplugging the optical drives.

Running W7 HP on an old home built pc with an Intel mobo (D845BG). 2g ram.
Great running hardware for XP. No boot delay in XP.
Upgraded flawlessly to 7; runs fine. No problems at all with OS.

Two 80g Maxtors, cable select, first ribbon position each on primary (the boot drive) & secondary channels. DVD drive & CD drive, cable select, second ribbon positions.

Upon bootup, real quick to the "Starting Windows" with the swirly stuff. Then suddenly, the red light goes off and the bootup stalls for one full minute. It then resumes on it's way to the desktop.

Performed a boot, with logging, and did a printout. Then I booted in Safe Mode to see where the stall is. Rips along until CLASSPNP.SYS shows. Then the 1 minute, then it continues. The driver that loads after CLASS... is cdrom.sys. It loads successfully after the 1 minute delay.

I figure one of the optical drives may be dodgy, so I unplug the power to both to see if the problem goes away. Now the pc won't boot at all - boot failure error. Curious!
Wondering if pinning the 4 pieces master & slave may help?

It might pay you to check your boot settings in the system BIOS.

If necessary, change the first boot device to your hard drive, and then see what happens when you reboot.

Unplug the IDE cable that goes to the two optical drives too, and see what happens.

When you burn an OS CD/DVD burn it at 10x for CD and 4x for DVD it worked for me in some cased black media can be a little off target for one prob and other is enable ACHI (nonraid) in the bios

seavixen32: No change.

alphanumeric: That partially worked.

apollodominion: It is my practice to burn at those speeds as well. Also, no RAID setting in this old BIOS.

After putzing around for a while, there are some accomplishments. If I change the pinning to master on both drives AND unplug the ribbon cables on the opticals, the pc boots after a 30-second BIOS-to-hard drive handoff delay. This OS boot has no stall; right into desktop in about 20-25 seconds.

Pinning the opticals to slave, and plugging everything back in, I boot with no BIOS delay but still have the 1 minute stall on the OS boot.

I'd like to run a couple of ideas by you guys & gals.
1. Both h/d's on the primary and both opticals on the secondary? (Repinned of course). I have the opticals under each hard drive.
2. How about setting a region on the opticals? Right now neither has one. Is there a hardware benefit to do this?

You can't have two drives set to master on the same IDE cable. One has to be master and the other set to slave. The only time you set them identical is if you use CS (cable select). When set to cable select the IDE connector sets what is slave and what is master.

I wouldn't do that. One h/d would be slave and one optical would be slave, hence my comment (repinned of course).

The implied question is: Would there be a hardware benefit putting like devices on each channel? Or does it not make a difference?

I putzed around some more. Put both h/d's on the primary and both opticals on the secondary. BINGO!!! Booted up in 25 seconds; no stall.

My guess is that this BIOS did not like the mixing of hard drives with opticals on the same channel.

Now, can some one answer the other question of applying a region to the opticals. Does it help? Does it make a difference?

OK, see in your first post you said you had the hard drives on primary and optical on secondary. I took that to mean that the two hard drives were on the primary IDE channel and the optical drives were both on the secondary IDE channel. Thats the way they are designated. It appears now that what you meant was you had one hard drive (master) and one optical drive (slave) on each channel. It shouldn't matter what combination you use as long as they are jumpered correctly, but in the real world some motherboards don't like certain combinations. It sounds like it was having a hard time identifying what was on each channel. In any case if its working and you're happy thats all that matters.