Hello, i am currently running windows xp pro, and have 2 hardrives main (hitachi 160gb) for system and programmes and a secondary (Maxtor 250gb) for my documents etc. i have found that with the secondary hd plugged in then the boot time for my computer is considerably slower than if i just had my main hd in. i have tried another smaller hd in as my secondary and the problem does not occur. i have run speedtests on both hds and my main is running fine and is up to speed but my secondary is reading and writing at about 2mbs which well below the expected speed at which is should be running, can anyone help me sorta out this problem.

thanks

This is hard to illustrate in just words but here goes:

In your computer you have two drive controllers IDE0 and IDE1 probably.
On IDE0, put your main drive and a CD/DVD ROM drive...make sure they are jumpered as master and slave.
On IDE1, install your secondary drive and any other secondary CD/DVD drives. Jumper them to be master and slave. Hard drives should almost always be master unless you have some other reason for not doing so.
On your first boot, go into Setup by pressing F1, F10, or DEL when you see the message come on screen.
Make sure that all drives are detected.
Sometimes you can enter the drive geometry (cylinders, heads, sectors). If you have an option for that, enter them for each drive. If not, then your BIOS will detect them automatically.
Also, if the secondary drive persists in slowing down your system, you should virus scan the entire thing to see if that is a problem.
Finally, turn off indexing on that drive by right clicking My Computer, Manage, Services, Indexing Service. Make the necessary changes there and reboot.