Unplugged dvd-drive, now nothing (besides folders) will load beyond the desktop.

[Italio48]

Update:Turning off everything under the "boot" tab in msconfig fixed the problem, turned it back on and now, for whatever reason, it's working as good as before.



Had to borrow an old sata cable from an old xp pc I have lying around, I never use the dvd-drive so I took that cable. Turned it on afterwards and now it will load only 4 icons on my desktop and the rest still have that loading default icon. The task bar is frozen with a loading hourglass every time I mouse over it and, while I can browse my folders fine, it's very slow.


Plugged everything back together, checking to see if there were any loose cables but it all checked out, still same thing. Safe mode works perfectly fine so I figure maybe it's a driver?
I have tried:
sfc scannow
changing the bios to no longer boot the dvd-drive/reseting to defaults
swapping ram out
turning the pc with the dvd-drive connected and disconnected
disabling all of the items in msconfig under the "startup" tab


Before I commit my time to trial and error with disabling more stuff in msconfig I'd like to see if one of you could help me determine what exactly could cause this particular problem under these cirucumstances.

Thanks.

 

[meaga1n]

Honestly I'd say just reinstall Windows. It's not a hardware fault (might be dying HDD though). Spending time with MSConfig is not fun and if you have all your data backed up a Windows reinstall is the way to go.
Plus, if it's SATA then it's likely to be a Core 2 Duo or newer which means you can reinstall Windows 10 instead of the security mess that is XP.