Slave drive causing XP not to boot

I have a 2 hard drive setup, C and R. The C drive is where Windows XP is installed. Sometime about 2 night ago, I restarted the computer and it would boot up until the windows XP loading screen and the blue bat at the bottom just kept going on and on for 15 minutes and it never booted. I decided to open the case and see what was going on. I unplugged my slave Drive(R) and windows boots fine. Also I plugged it back in and it did not boot again, I think that proves that either the drive is bad or its causing something else to go wrong. I CAN boot both drives in safe mode, and I am completely able to read and write to and from the R drive, I even ran a virus scan on it without any results. Does anyone have any idea why this happened and how to fix it? I'd really appreciate any help, thanks

UPDATE - I disabled Write caching on the disk under its policies in the hardware tab of its properties and booted up again just to see and it works fine now, i have no idea why thoguh, i'm glad it works but i'd like to understand what did it, if anyone knows post please thanks

is "r" just storage ? if so then make sure you are using a slave jumper on the drive and just to be safe use the slave port on the ide cable. if "r" drive was damaged but bios is setup to boot up from "c" it would still boot up with no problem, at the most it would run "scandisk" for the 2nd drive.
are they both ide ?
you can also switch the ide cable with the one from your cd or a spare one.
good luck.

yes R is only storage, they were working perfectly until a restart, then it just randomly did that. The drives have the jumpers set like they should and the propper IDE cables are connected to each(they are both IDE). Like I mentioned though, i fixed it by disabling write caching on the R disk, then restarted and all was well, what confuses me is that this drive was set up exactly like this for like 2 weeks now and this only happened 2 days ago, and i have restared the computer many times since O_o

ANOTHER UPDATE - It did it again, apparently I was lucky for it to boot that one time. I tried to install a program and it restarted the computer and it did it again, My hard drive is causing windows to hang at the boot screen. Is this the hard drive's fault? windows? whats going on? thanks

reboot in safe mode and stay there accessing your storage drive and doing all kind of things to see if the same happens there, i would also get a "drive fitness" floppy and boot up from it to check your hard drive physical performance, make a google search for that program, i believe it's free.

i've called up the manufactureer of the drive, i used a utility to scan it and it looks like its in perfect working order. the tech supprt guy said that it might be a problem with windows and that i should run a fix on it. well i'm not sure how to do that. I booted from the install CD and i hit "R" for repair and i get a dos type command prompt and only a few options as to what i could do. i did fixmbr and fixboot but that didnt help. How can i reinstall windows system files from the CD, without erasing any data on the computer? the tech supprt guy siad that might help.

boot up from xp cd, on first choice screen choose "install windows" (enter), then i believe next screen you must press f8 to agree to the terms, next screen it will tell you that it found a windows folder and if you wished to repair it, don't choose "recovery console", choose the first which i think it goes like "repair windows", whole reinstallation might take about 1/2 hour, it will override system files but personal files and programs will not be touched.

ok i did all that and it still doesnt work, same situation as before, it works in safe mode but it wont let windows boot normally. Also if it helps any, I have disabled it in device manager (under safe mode)and windows will load normally, so at least i know its not a physical harware issue with the controller or MB. It must be either windows or the drive, but it works fine in safe mode so i think its windows. I have no idea what else to do, the only thing i can think of is format the computer and reinstall but this isnt my computer and i cant do that. Any other suggestions? otherwise i give up.

thanks for all the help so far, david

try this: open the case, look for the cmos battery and remove, wait for about 1 minute and then put it back, when you power the pc up it will take straight to the bios settings there choose "default settings".
also before reformating the hard drive i would try a diff master drive on that computer and use the same slave drive, of course it can't be xp since it has a security setting that when it recognizes diff hardware it locks itself, a hd with me, 98 or 2k would work, all this to rule out items failure and stay away from reformating the hd.
good luck

I believe everything in the cmos is ok because the hard drive is uable in safe mode, so it is detected. also I dont have any other equipment to play with anymore so i cant swap parts out.

I found out another interesting item. I disabled the drive in devica manager in Safe mode, rebooted normally and re-enabled it and it works perfectly, it just something about it when windows boots, right as its about to go to the user logon screen it hangs in the loading screen. I seem to have found a way around this but i'd still like to know why this happened