Quake3World

I've got this hard drive that's on the fritz, locking up my system and making whirr-clicking noises every once in a while. It's a remenant from a 6-year-old PC I gutted to add into this one as an additional hard drive.

I tried removing it, but when I go to boot up my computer and it's detecting boot devices, it gives me an error asking for a boot disk after checking the A drive and CD ROMs.

My OS isn't on that HD, it's on my 2 40GB RAIDed HDs, which come first in the boot order. No matter what order I change it in in BIOS, I still get the error.

The only thing sharing the power strip for that hard drive is the A drive, which is disabled anyway, and the IDE cable goes right into the middle of the mobo, next to the memory. The 2 RAIDed HDs go into the bottom corner next to each other.

WTF is preventing me from unplugging this POS so I can get rid of the problem?

Your OS drive doesnt have a boot thingy? I'd suggest getting a spare drive from somewhere and installing the OS on that. Then boot and backup all the data on your current drive and format it, reinstall the OS, and copy your data back.

You can disable the offending drive in device manager until you decide to format/fresh install windows. Then you can remove it.

Shit, I have to format my hard drive?

no. i'm not sure what the solution to this one is, but i'm not clear why they're suggesting a need to format the drive your OS is on. that's not even the trouble drive.