Hard Drive Refuses to Boot

Sijo45

Sijo45

Sijo45

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Joined
24 Apr 2006
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Location
High Wycombe
Hi All

I am trying to upgrade the hard drive on my gf's PC from a frankly ancient IBM 60GXP to a 500GB Seagate 7200.10 ATA drive. My problem is, I've ghosted her old drive, containing a working install of XP Pro, onto the new drive using my PC, ensuring the options are set to make the drive bootable, and all was fine. I could read the new drive on my machine without any problems. However, when I put the drive in her machine, it refused to boot, hanging after updating the DMI pool. After going round this loop a few more times, I decided to just install XP pro fresh and put her old data on a separate partition. The first section of the install went fine, with her PC being able to see the drive and copying over the installation files. However, on reboot, it either says:

"Press any key to boot from CD.... Error loading operating system"

or if the hard drive is set as first boot device, it just freezes after the POST screen.

Any ideas?

For info, the drive is set as primary master and her PC is a Sempron 2400+ on an Abit KD7A motherboard with KT400A chipset. All RAM slots are populated for a total of 1GB of RAM but sure that can't be the problem!
 
that motherboard is fairly old isn't it ?

Im not sure its fully supporting the 500gb drive you've just put in
Check for bios update
 
I've not seen that error for a few years but from memory the only way I was ever able to clear it was by clearing the CMOS and resetting the bios options to default, this might not work for you but it should be an easy one to try.
 
Meronem said:
that motherboard is fairly old isn't it ?

Im not sure its fully supporting the 500gb drive you've just put in
Check for bios update
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's a pretty old board. Did check for BIOS updates. None relating to drive size limits. However, I tried restoring the old drive onto a 100GB partition on the new drive, but still no boot joy.

Now tried changing hard drive addressing mode in BIOS to 'Large' instead of 'CHS'. This way, it seems to be letting me install windows, but whether it works fully remains to be seen.
 
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