Good NT HD won't boot in different PC
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Good NT HD won't boot in different PC
I keep a couple of old HDDs for testing and diagnostics.
One is a 4.3GB Seagate with a good installation of NT4(SP6) that boots OK in the Pentium HP PC in which it was installed.
When I take it out and plug it into another, younger, Pentuim III PC it won't boot.
The BIOS sees the drive and configures itself in "Auto" to agree with Seagate's Tech data.
There's almost nothing to change in these modern bits of kit.
Any ideas on how to make it boot?
One is a 4.3GB Seagate with a good installation of NT4(SP6) that boots OK in the Pentium HP PC in which it was installed.
When I take it out and plug it into another, younger, Pentuim III PC it won't boot.
The BIOS sees the drive and configures itself in "Auto" to agree with Seagate's Tech data.
There's almost nothing to change in these modern bits of kit.
Any ideas on how to make it boot?
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Hi
How far does it get/what error message do you get? i.e. do you get a blue screen during boot (possible mismatched hardware) or do you not even get as far as the boot menu?
You could try booting from a floppy.
With the HD plugged into the working PC, format a floppy disk under NT, copy the following files from the root of your drive - ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini, then put the drive in your other PC, put the floppy in, and try to boot. If you cnt see these files, enable the display of hidden files in tools > options
The way to recover an NT installation is to make boot disks, and once booted with these, select the repair option. Obviously, using this option may render the drive unusable in the other machine
You need 3 blank floppy disks
Make the disks by executing winnt.exe from a command prompt with the switch /ox
Winnt.exe can be found on your original installation media
Run the command from a command prompt;
1. start > run > cmd [enter]
2. [path to media]\i386\winnt.exe /ox
I hope this helps, but if not, please reply here
How far does it get/what error message do you get? i.e. do you get a blue screen during boot (possible mismatched hardware) or do you not even get as far as the boot menu?
You could try booting from a floppy.
With the HD plugged into the working PC, format a floppy disk under NT, copy the following files from the root of your drive - ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini, then put the drive in your other PC, put the floppy in, and try to boot. If you cnt see these files, enable the display of hidden files in tools > options
The way to recover an NT installation is to make boot disks, and once booted with these, select the repair option. Obviously, using this option may render the drive unusable in the other machine
You need 3 blank floppy disks
Make the disks by executing winnt.exe from a command prompt with the switch /ox
Winnt.exe can be found on your original installation media
Run the command from a command prompt;
1. start > run > cmd [enter]
2. [path to media]\i386\winnt.exe /ox
I hope this helps, but if not, please reply here
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Thanks to both.
This is turning out to be a BIOS/partitioning/drive parameter identification problem and may be unsolvable without re-installing NT4 on the drive in the newer PC.
PC Alpha is a 1996-7 HP Pentium with Phoenix BIOS Rel 4.01 and sees the drive in "Auto" the way it should. NT4 loads like a box of snails rather than a box of birds (it's a 166MHz!), bit it's as solid as a rock. Partition Magic sees it exactly the way it should. The disk was created three years ago and funtions as well as it can at that speed.
PC Beta is a 1999 Dell Pentium 500MHz also with Phoenix BIOS Rel 4.5 and sees the drive in "Auto" the way it should. During Boot, it finishes the POST and stops with the cursor flashing in the top left corner of a black screen; that's it, not even the dreaded "operating system not found".
When PC Beta is booted with its regular Win2K disk, and the problem HD is installed as slave, the BIOS sees the drive in "Auto" excatly as it should. Windows Explorer sees the drive too and I have copied off the Data that I want to hang on to.
Partition Magic, however, now doesn't like the drive and calls it bad; it sees a different set of Cylinders (240 vs 255) from the manufacturer's figures. So this is the boot problem, but there is no way to force PC Beta to see the disk in the same way that PC Alpha does.
I've tried back loading a BIOS flash to update 4 as opposed to update 11 but it made no difference.
So next step is to re-partition in PC Beta and re-install NT4. It'll be interesting to see if PC Alpha will see the drive then.
I passes the time...
This is turning out to be a BIOS/partitioning/drive parameter identification problem and may be unsolvable without re-installing NT4 on the drive in the newer PC.
PC Alpha is a 1996-7 HP Pentium with Phoenix BIOS Rel 4.01 and sees the drive in "Auto" the way it should. NT4 loads like a box of snails rather than a box of birds (it's a 166MHz!), bit it's as solid as a rock. Partition Magic sees it exactly the way it should. The disk was created three years ago and funtions as well as it can at that speed.
PC Beta is a 1999 Dell Pentium 500MHz also with Phoenix BIOS Rel 4.5 and sees the drive in "Auto" the way it should. During Boot, it finishes the POST and stops with the cursor flashing in the top left corner of a black screen; that's it, not even the dreaded "operating system not found".
When PC Beta is booted with its regular Win2K disk, and the problem HD is installed as slave, the BIOS sees the drive in "Auto" excatly as it should. Windows Explorer sees the drive too and I have copied off the Data that I want to hang on to.
Partition Magic, however, now doesn't like the drive and calls it bad; it sees a different set of Cylinders (240 vs 255) from the manufacturer's figures. So this is the boot problem, but there is no way to force PC Beta to see the disk in the same way that PC Alpha does.
I've tried back loading a BIOS flash to update 4 as opposed to update 11 but it made no difference.
So next step is to re-partition in PC Beta and re-install NT4. It'll be interesting to see if PC Alpha will see the drive then.
I passes the time...
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Have you considered the possibility that it could be Motherboard Resources to blame? It's easy to see these resources in any other Windows OS other than NT4, from the Device Manager. It is a little different trying to tweak these parameters in NT4.
Also remember that NT4 is not a Plug 'n' Pray operating system, so it won't sort out the resource allocation for you (also, remember there could be a switch for this in the BIOS). It will take the parameters that are saved to the OS and if they don't work, the boot-up will fail. Unfortunately, these parameters are configured when the OS is installed, so it could be possible that the only way to get that disk working as a primary master, is to re-install NT4.
Just a thought.
Also remember that NT4 is not a Plug 'n' Pray operating system, so it won't sort out the resource allocation for you (also, remember there could be a switch for this in the BIOS). It will take the parameters that are saved to the OS and if they don't work, the boot-up will fail. Unfortunately, these parameters are configured when the OS is installed, so it could be possible that the only way to get that disk working as a primary master, is to re-install NT4.
Just a thought.
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This could be the key :
"The BIOS sees the drive and configures itself in "Auto" to agree with Seagate's Tech data. "
Some of the older BIOSii have a problem with the AUTO and they fake it. The best way is to say "NONE" or MANUAL at that screen and then go over to the Disk Identification Page and do a manual pull on the drive. Select the option when offered that agrees with the known cyl/sector count. This will then hard copy the disk params to the first screen.
Sorry to be vague but I don't know which brand of BIOS you are on. It may be that you have a system later than the one I am thinking of - in which case ignore all before. Worth a thought though. I have lost some hair over this problem in the recent past doing an upgrade on an old box.
MG
"The BIOS sees the drive and configures itself in "Auto" to agree with Seagate's Tech data. "
Some of the older BIOSii have a problem with the AUTO and they fake it. The best way is to say "NONE" or MANUAL at that screen and then go over to the Disk Identification Page and do a manual pull on the drive. Select the option when offered that agrees with the known cyl/sector count. This will then hard copy the disk params to the first screen.
Sorry to be vague but I don't know which brand of BIOS you are on. It may be that you have a system later than the one I am thinking of - in which case ignore all before. Worth a thought though. I have lost some hair over this problem in the recent past doing an upgrade on an old box.
MG
Plastic PPRuNer
I don't know NT at all well, but if it's anything like Win9.x then I'm not surprised that your drive won't boot. The BIOS should sort out the HDD parameters on AUTO if the dive is jumpered properly. But Windows tries to wake up, looks around it and finds that just about everything that it is expecting to see in Device Manager (particularly under System Devices) isn't there or is different and promptly has a permanent nervous breakdown. This isn't DOS y'know.
You can occasionally succeed in transferring Win9.x to a new machine by deleting everything in Device Manager and promptly shutting down. When it tries to wake up Windows will be very confused and (if it doesn't lock up) will demand it's installation disk and spend quite a while sorting itself out. You may or may not get a stable OS out of it.
"..may be unsolvable without re-installing NT4 on the drive in the newer PC" is right.
You can occasionally succeed in transferring Win9.x to a new machine by deleting everything in Device Manager and promptly shutting down. When it tries to wake up Windows will be very confused and (if it doesn't lock up) will demand it's installation disk and spend quite a while sorting itself out. You may or may not get a stable OS out of it.
"..may be unsolvable without re-installing NT4 on the drive in the newer PC" is right.
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I did this a few times with win9x not NT, load windows in a different machine right up to the windows detecting hardware bit. switch off machine transfer Hard disk to new machine and windows chuggs away completing its instalation on new machine.
Seems a silly thing to do , but I had no floppy and the other machine didn't have the option of booting from the windows cd rom.
PS the only experience I had with NT was it totaled a brand new 20 gig IBM deskstar, had to return same to IBM.
Have no complaints about win2k its been running my dual system steady as a rock.
Seems a silly thing to do , but I had no floppy and the other machine didn't have the option of booting from the windows cd rom.
PS the only experience I had with NT was it totaled a brand new 20 gig IBM deskstar, had to return same to IBM.
Have no complaints about win2k its been running my dual system steady as a rock.
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Thanks to you all for the time and trouble you took to reply. My first post wasn't clear enough so I tried harder in the second.
Both BIOSs are Phoenix but different generations. My other "spare" HDD is 2.1GB loaded with Windows 95 and I can swap it backwards and forwards between the two PCs to my heart's content, allowing for the paroxisms of agnoy it goes through when it keeps meeting new hardware. I just ignore most of the driver requests because I'm only doing these installations for a particular reason and not to have a fully working W95 or NT4 setup.
References to BSOD and Plug and Pray
don't apply to my problem as I wasn't even getting to the boot menu - y'know the
one that asks you to select which OS you want (as in Win2K). I believe because the younger PC (Beta) wasn't finding the boot sector.
Mac t K, for my propose, a raw NT4 installation is ideal even though (because?) it's not PnP; I can load it with its default drivers quickly and get a working set-up. So, that's what I did after using DOS to reset the partitions to two 2GB FAT. Using the newer PC (Beta), NT4 loaded like it used to, and it's updated to SP6 using defaults. No additional sound, graphics or modem drivers or printers, just SCSI to run the tape drive. And now I CAN swap the drive between the old and newer PCs without a problem. Interestingly, if I look at the partition info using DOS and FDISK, I get slightly different results! But the results in NT4 Disk Administrator are the same. You'd have liked NT4 for its stability, but loading hardware was a lengthy process. But as it was really meant to be a Server, hardware wasn't a major consideration. Its Hardware Abstraction Layer (Mrs fob loves it when I talk about my HAL!
) did protect the kernel from most problems.
So it was a BIOS/partitioning problem that Partition Magic could see but not fix. The BIOS in PC Alpha was probably misguided if not actually lying about the translation method to use on the HDD; hence wrongly reporting the number of sectors as 240 instead of 255.
Master Green, "Right ON" but I tried your solution re "Auto" and "User" early in the drama and it didn't work, sadly. (Hair? I remember hair!) And F-b-W I did try the Non-PnP toggle in BIOS and that didn't work either; recall that no OS came into play here at all. Tried the reset jumper on the MoBO of PC Beta too!
Given that no-one in their right mind would go back from Win2K to NT4 why did I bother? Well I had a bunch of old 2GB backup tapes that I couldn't get the data off using Veritas Backup Exec Pro 4.5 running on Win2K. So I decided to re-create the set-up on which the backups were created; that was Seagate Backup Exec 2.0 running on NT4. (Seagate 2.0 wouldn't run on Win2K)
It worked, and the data is pouring (trickling) off these 5/6 year old tapes as I write. So it was worth it.
All this mass of data has made me question the wisdom of doing so-called "Full Backups" regularly. There is no need for me to have eleventeen backed-up copies of Application Files that come on program disks or of letters, spreadsheets etc that are old. So I'm reviewing seriously the plan for regular backups in the future.
One of the most important things to BU is the Backup Catalogue Directory itself! It can take half a day to catalogue even a 2GB tape just to find out what's on it! Even more bizarre is the fact that Seagate (now Veritas) make the catalogue directory an exclusion from backups! That's one of the first things to sort out in the Registry when I return the kit to normal.
Thanks again, it was all worth it! Now a happy bunny.
Both BIOSs are Phoenix but different generations. My other "spare" HDD is 2.1GB loaded with Windows 95 and I can swap it backwards and forwards between the two PCs to my heart's content, allowing for the paroxisms of agnoy it goes through when it keeps meeting new hardware. I just ignore most of the driver requests because I'm only doing these installations for a particular reason and not to have a fully working W95 or NT4 setup.
References to BSOD and Plug and Pray
don't apply to my problem as I wasn't even getting to the boot menu - y'know the one that asks you to select which OS you want (as in Win2K). I believe because the younger PC (Beta) wasn't finding the boot sector.
Mac t K, for my propose, a raw NT4 installation is ideal even though (because?) it's not PnP; I can load it with its default drivers quickly and get a working set-up. So, that's what I did after using DOS to reset the partitions to two 2GB FAT. Using the newer PC (Beta), NT4 loaded like it used to, and it's updated to SP6 using defaults. No additional sound, graphics or modem drivers or printers, just SCSI to run the tape drive. And now I CAN swap the drive between the old and newer PCs without a problem. Interestingly, if I look at the partition info using DOS and FDISK, I get slightly different results! But the results in NT4 Disk Administrator are the same. You'd have liked NT4 for its stability, but loading hardware was a lengthy process. But as it was really meant to be a Server, hardware wasn't a major consideration. Its Hardware Abstraction Layer (Mrs fob loves it when I talk about my HAL!
) did protect the kernel from most problems. So it was a BIOS/partitioning problem that Partition Magic could see but not fix. The BIOS in PC Alpha was probably misguided if not actually lying about the translation method to use on the HDD; hence wrongly reporting the number of sectors as 240 instead of 255.
Master Green, "Right ON" but I tried your solution re "Auto" and "User" early in the drama and it didn't work, sadly. (Hair? I remember hair!)
And F-b-W I did try the Non-PnP toggle in BIOS and that didn't work either; recall that no OS came into play here at all. Tried the reset jumper on the MoBO of PC Beta too!Given that no-one in their right mind would go back from Win2K to NT4 why did I bother? Well I had a bunch of old 2GB backup tapes that I couldn't get the data off using Veritas Backup Exec Pro 4.5 running on Win2K. So I decided to re-create the set-up on which the backups were created; that was Seagate Backup Exec 2.0 running on NT4. (Seagate 2.0 wouldn't run on Win2K)
It worked, and the data is pouring (trickling) off these 5/6 year old tapes as I write. So it was worth it.
All this mass of data has made me question the wisdom of doing so-called "Full Backups" regularly. There is no need for me to have eleventeen backed-up copies of Application Files that come on program disks or of letters, spreadsheets etc that are old. So I'm reviewing seriously the plan for regular backups in the future.
One of the most important things to BU is the Backup Catalogue Directory itself! It can take half a day to catalogue even a 2GB tape just to find out what's on it! Even more bizarre is the fact that Seagate (now Veritas) make the catalogue directory an exclusion from backups! That's one of the first things to sort out in the Registry when I return the kit to normal.
Thanks again, it was all worth it! Now a happy bunny.
