Cant boot system with new HDD

FishPolice

FishPolice

FishPolice

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Joined
22 Aug 2003
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768
Location
Bucks
Been tearing my hair out all day on this...

I have 2 drives in my pc: 80gb sata & 120gb IDE. The sata drive has got windows on it. I use the 120gb drive as a storage drive. My plan was to transfer the data on the 120gb drive to my new 300gb drive and give the 120gb drive to a mate.

I can boot up with both the 120gb & 300gb drive installed (along with the sata drive of course) or with just the sata drive but the system will not boot up with the 300gb drive & the sata drive. If I add the 120gb drive then it works :confused:

This is doing my head in! I need to install my mate's new pc but can't until I can get my pc to run with the 300gb drive. I have messed with jumper settings, I have made sure the drives are recognised in the bios & set to the correct boot order but my pc is still giving me the one fingured salute :mad:

ps. If it's at all relevant I did have a problem getting windows to see the 300gb drive originally. I had to use Disk Management in Administrative tools to get the drive to show up in My Computer.

[windows XP sp1]
 
Well it was dead simple afterall. Basically it seems all I needed to do was run the windows version of the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Utilities prog and choose to install the drive.
I've always used Western Digital drives but this was the 1st time I'd needed to actually run a drive installation prog.

Basically what I had done originally was attach the drive so I had 3 drives running. The 300gb drive wouldn't show up in My Computer until I messed with it in Disk Management (got that from the sticky -didn't help in this case but useful for the future).
I had thought that this was enough & then had simply copied & pasted contents of my 120gb drive onto my new 300gb drive. [I had tried using the dos version of the Data Lifeguard utility to do this but it had just frozen each time which is why I went for copy/paste]. This was all fine & good in that I had had 3 drives connected & seemingly working but as I had mentioned before, whenever I unplugged the 120gb drive windows just wouldn't load. It would freeze at various stages of bootup even though the bios settings were fine. No jumper settings I tried made any difference (tbh I suspect they are not needed anyway on this mobo).

In the end I had to reformat the drive again (for about the 15th time lol) and run the windows version of the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Utilities to install it as a storage type of drive.

One theory I came up with when I was struggling was that I'd accidentally copied across some kind of hidden system file which identified the drive as the 120gb drive. When I'd rebooted Windows had then got confused because the drive was not what it seemed.
[edit] If this is the case then this hidden file must have been solidly embedded & only removable by WD tools because even with a reformat the drive wouldn't work without the 120gb one in the system. Like I say, only a theory & was a desperate one at that :D
 
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