New hard drive instalation problem.

[BRL]

Hi all. My old hard drive (C) gave it up recently and my mate at work gave me his 'old' one to replace it. I plugged it in and when I re-boot, it says no boot failure or something like that and it asks me to insert a boot disk. I have tried every combination (master/slave) between the one thats in there now (drive D) and the new one that went in place of the old drive C. I have even swapped them over and placed the new one where drive D is and the old one where drive C used to be..!! No joy, when I do that it asks for a boot disk again.

Do I put the new one in and boot up with my XP disk and load windows on to that? That is all I can think of doing at the moment......:confused:

[126,7]

What OS was on the "old" disk? Maybe your mate formatted the old disk before giving it to you. (to get rid of all the secrets he had on there)
When you try and boot up, have you got a CD in the CD drive? If its not the XP disk, then it wants the XP disk so that it can boot up.
If you have nothing in the CD drive when starting up, then I don’t know what the problem is….but wish you luck.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

BRL,

I am guessing your friend gave you the hard drive after he wiped the drive. For the drive to be bootable, it needs to be Partitioned (and made active), Formatted, and have the bootable system files on it.

If you have a Win98 computer, you can make a bootable floppy and load fdisk and format on to it. You can use that disk to make your new hard drive bootable.

If you are running WinXP, you need to put the WinXP CD in your drive and boot from the CD and to a fresh install. (The WinXP CD will partition and format the drive for you, so no floppy needed.)

Take Care,

Richard

[BRL]

Thanks chaps.

He gave me the disk formatted by himself. I think it used to have winME on but am not too sure to be honest.

Richard, do you mean I have to install XP on the drive? I already have it on my other drive. :confused:

Thanks again :)

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

BRL,

I am trying to follow what is going on. From your first post, it sounded like your primary hard drive on your computer failed. So now you need a new hard drive for your computer. Your friend then gives you an old hard drive he had so you could get up and running again.

After your second post, it sounds like you had your secondary hard drive go out on your computer and your friend gave you an old hard drive for you to use, but you cannot access it and you keep getting a boot failure when you have it in your comp.

Now I am trying to figure out what you want to do with it. I think you are saying that when you put this drive on your comp, the comp no longer boots, when you have the hard drive out of your comp, the computer does boot.

If you have two hard drives and one does boot into WinXP:

Take the new hard drive that your friend gave you and make it primary master with an optical drive as secondary master. (Leave your WinXP drive out at the moment.) Boot with the WinXP CD and go though the setup screen to the point where you setup the partition on the hard drive. Delete any partitions on there and create a new one. Then tell the Setup you are done and want to quit. Then take your WinXP hard drive and make it Primary Master, take your friend's hard drive and make it secondary master. (No optical drives at this time.) Then boot into windows and format your friend's drive in Windows. Now you should have two hard drives that can be accessed and only one that will boot. Now you can shut down and arrange your hard drives and optical drives any way you want on your IDE Channels.

If you gave us the details on all your drives we can give you the jumper settings for the drives to get them all working together.

Take Care,

Richard

[BRL]

Hi Richard. My pc when bought new had one hard drive. This was C. I added another and this one is called D. Now, C failed and will not work. A disk-scan reports the disk as damaged. So, I loaded winXP onto my D drive. The C drive is still plugged in as the primary and the D is the slave. Confused, yea, me too. It gets better though. At the moment I have everything on D and all is well. What I am thinking now is doing what you suggest above except I do not understand what an "optical" drive is/looks like. But I think I have a rough idea based on what you say so I might have a go at it later on. The D drive is a Seagate and the 'new' one is a Quantum fireball.

I want this 'new' disk as it is 20mb and I am taking a lot of pictures (with my ixus400) and want to store the pics on it. ( I back the good ones up on CD every week, the rest I have on my HD). I recently bought a 256mb card for the camera and the pictures are huge on 'large' setting. I just basically want it to store all my pictures and videos on it.

Thanks for your patience Richard. :)

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

BRL,

Oops, was using computer speak again, (looks behind the door to make sure Rob, a.k.a. PPRuNe Towers, is not there to slap me), I have to watch that a little more. :ooh:

Setup the Seagate as Primary Master and use the end of the ribbon to connect the drive. Make your CD Drive Secondary Master and the Quantum Secondary Slave. (Performance of the Quantum does not matter in your application, so limiting it to ATA-33 in this case should be fine.)

If you can follow the steps above you can get the Quantum partitioned and formatted. Then it should work.

Here are the Jumper Settings for most Quantum Drives:

Quantum® ATA hard drives have their jumper block located at the back of the drive on the interface connector (see the first diagram below), or for some earlier models it may located directly on the drive's printed circuit board (see the second diagram below). In either case, the most common setting for a master drive is to install the jumper on the DS position, and the most common setting for a slave drive is to simply remove the jumper or store it on the park (PK) position if available

http://service.maxtor.com/rightnow/images/stndrd_jumper_tst4.gif

The diagram above applies to the following Quantum® hard drives:

Fireball models: lct20, lct15, lct10, lct8, CX, CR, EX, EL, SE, and ST.
Fireball Plus models: AS, LM, KX, and KA.

Note: Some of the newer Fireball lct and Fireball Plus models ship from the factory with a default jumper setting of CS.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The diagram below applies to all Fireball TM capacities and to the Fireball 540/640/1080/1280 models.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/images/knowledge_base/fireball_jumper2.gif

Take Care,

Richard

[ORAC]

I'd take a guess and say that your XP is on an active partition on your original D drive which is set as a slave. The drive your friend gave you is set as a master and the machine is trying to boot from that and failing.

1. Take out your original drive and put it to one side.

2. Take the new drive and set the jumpers as master and install on the primary IDE cable.

3. Set the jumper for your CD drive as master and put it on the other secondary IDE cable.

4. Set your BIOS to boot from the CD drive before the HDD.

5. get your BIOS to detect the new drive. (Depending on the age, it will either have an auto-detect setting or you will have to tell it to look).

6. Insert your XP CD and let the PC boot.

7. When prompted, get XP to reformat the drive as a single partition and install XP.

8. Set the BIOS to boot from the HDD before the CD, remove the CD and reboot.

Your machine should now boot with the "new" drive as drive C and the CD as drive D.

If your get that far, you can start on the old drive that stopped working on you.

9. Set the jumper on your old drive to slave and put it on the same,secondary, IDE cable as the CD drive. Then reboot into BIOS and get the machine to detect the drive. If it does, then it can be reformatted, if it doesn't, it's dead and will need replacement. If your machine won't reboot, then the old drive is dragging it down. Bin it.

10. Reboot the machine and see if the drive is detected by Windows Explorer/My PC. If so, It will become the D drive, and the CD will move down to become the E drive. Copy all the files you want to keep off it to the new C drive. You should then use XP to reformat it to try and get rid of the problems on it. (See the link about Disk Management below).

11. If the drive is working and is detected by the BIOS, but Explorer can't see it. Go to Disk Management (http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/install_xp_disk_mgmt.html) and see if it is there. if so, you've lost the data but can try to reformat the drive. Then reboot and the drives should re-order as above. If Disk Management can't see it, or the format fails, I could suggest a low-level format to try and recover it, but, to be honest, you'd be better off just binning it.

[Background Noise]

Shouldn't you be able to set the CMOS to boot from the secondary HDD?

[Keef]

Don't think so. The CMOS will boot from whichever HDD it thinks is primary.

I'm not sure quite what BRL is trying to do - he's made the former Drive D bootable; does he want to keep it like that (so make it Drive C), or make the new one the bootable and C? It's all down to the jumpers, but it's hard to format a new drive as bootable and C if there's already a bootable drive there - you risk formatting your existing drive and losing everything off it.

I wonder what else was on the now-dead drive C? Apart fron the operating system (no problem to replace that), I mean.

[BRL]

I am not sure what I am trying to do either Keef..!! All I want is the 'new' drive in so I can start using it. I don't know how inportant it being the C drive, I havn't got a clue, all I want is the drive in and working.

Yesterday, I tried to do what was suggested above but when it came to booting up, the comp was asking me to put a boot disk in drive A. I don't have a boot disk as I have winxp, just the cd and the computer will not read from the cd when trying to boot up. I have tried sorting that out by pressing F8 and going into the menu that comes up then but it still wont have it. I am off to bed now so will try and give it a go later if I have time.

Thanks again. :)

[ORAC]

Windows XP Setup Boot Disks (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/q310/9/94.asp&NoWebContent=1)

[Mac the Knife]

"Windows XP Setup Boot Disks" - he won't have 'em and he won't be able to download 'em. [But then how is he posting?]

Have you got a Windows 98 emergency boot disk (or know someone who has one/can make you one [anyone with a running Win98 installation] ? Stuff it in, reboot and you'll be able to see the CDROM (opical drive) & run the XP install CD.

Actually, if the BIOS is relatively modern you should be able to tell the BIOS to boot from the CDROM and off you go straight away. If the BIOS is a bit more modern you can tell it to boot from E:, F:, or G: or H: (mine doesn't go any higher than that I don't think) and it'll boot from any bootable partition that has been made active.

Still slightly confused.............

Happy Xmas to all !!!

Mac

[ORAC]

Pressing F8 gets you into the Windows menus, you want to get into your PCs BIOS before that.

As soon as you turn on your machine, watch the screen and it should tell you to press one or more keys just about immediately to get into the BIOS. The usual key is the Delete key, it's the bottom left key in the block of 6 keys between the main qwerty keys and the number keys.

if it doesn't tell you, try tapping the delete key as your machine boots.

When you get into the BIOS go to the menu page where it shows the primary and secondary master and slave devices. Select each in turn and follow the menu selections for autodetection.

Once the machine has found the drives, follow the instructions to exit and save. The machine should then reboot and find the drives.

There should also be a menu in the BIOS giving the order in which the machine tries the devices looking for a boot disk. The older machines will just offer A-C or C-A (A = floppy, C=HDD). The newer ones will offer additional choices such as the CD drive. But they also normally autodetect the drives every boot.

I may be down in Saltdean tomorrow night, leaving on Boxing day. If you want, I can drop in. I'll drop you note with my mobile number.

[BRL]

Thanks chaps. I am going to leave it for a few days, too busy here at moment and working nights this week doesn't help.

Orac, got your PM, ta, see my reply. Also, if you are down this way on xmas day then you simply must head down to the pier at 1100 to watch the swimmers swim out to the end and back. I will be there with a load of mates, not swimming I must add, just opening the champange, its a bit of a tradition now and not to be missed... :)

Merry Christmas all.. :)

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

BRL,

Till after Christmas then. For now set your old HD as Primary Master and your CD Drive as Primary Slave. Once that is working and booting into WinXP, we will worry about the HD your friend gave you. ;)

Take Care,

Richard