"preparing automatic repair" during windows 8 boot

I am getting "preparing automatic repair" during windows 8 boot under some specific conditions.  This on a new preloaded windows 8  inspiron 660.

I have an 3.5 inch hard drive I am trying to mount inside the new dell machine.  If we leave this external drive uncabled to the new machine all is good.

This hard drive is a windows xp bootable (old master boot record, 8 year old system) drive where our old data is stored.

With the drive mounted internally we get the "preparing automatic repair" during boot.

If we boot without the drive mounted we can plug the drive into a usb adapter and we can read the drive just fine.  However if we try to boot the machine with the usb drive plugged in, we get the "preparing automatic repair" and the machine just sits there.  (I don't know how long, but at least a few minutes).

So it seems windows 8 wants no other bootable drive as competition for the queen windows 8 operating system.

The machine is set up fine boot wise, just as from the factory.  I can mount "other" disk drives internally that are newly formatted and boot just fine.

I've spent way too many hours on this and after google searching tonight, I realize many others are having similar issues with the message: "preparing automatic repair"

I want to mount this 3.5 inch hard drive internally to put backups on.

Any ideas?  What's wrong with this thing.  Seems a bit untested in the wild.