I temporarily installed a hard drive on an available IDE PATA drive on my computer and now I want it to go away! I have unmounted it completely deleted lines in fstab, I do not see it in etc/mtab but it still shows up in Yast I've found it is IDE DMA mode and I cant delete from here and I still see it in Hardware information under disk and IDE sections. I can not delete or have any other control from there. Anyway, somehow when I remove the disk from my system it prevents boot and hangs before config screens start, with a blinking cursor forever.
It prevents boooting from my sata drives from there. I simply cannot get rid of this drive. When I hook it back up it boots, but only then.
Does anyone know what it causing this issue?
thanks

If it completely prevents the system from booting, it could be a BIOS issue. Have you tried disabling the drive from BIOS? Or for that matter, turning off the IDE controller in BIOS if you don't plan on using it.

Excellent suggestion that led to the solution. I did try disabling the drive in the BIOS previously but it didn't work. finally I just used load BIOS defaults and as you suggest, the OS has been restored to booting now.

Thank You!