New Hard drive wont boot

[Debacle]

Posted a new thread about 15 mins ago and havent seen it pop up so must have hit a wrong button.

Problem is I have fitted a new drive and put a fresh copy of xp on it. So I have 2 drives with an o/s on each which work perfectly.

Everything is fine until I try to get it to boot off the new drive. I get an error message that it cant boot off the drive insert system disk.

On the bios the new drive is recognized as the primary master and the old one is the primary slave and jumpers on each are set to cable select.

New drive is a seagate 500gb st3500630A.

Am I missing something simple??

[kaa45]

How old is the computer? Can the BIOS handle that big a drive? Both IDE 80 conductor cable drives? Were both drives in when you ran XP install? Is OS on both XP?

[Debacle]

Computer is almost 4 years old, motherboard is ASUS A7V8X-MX with an Athlon 2.4. Like I said everything runs fine until you try to change the bios to boot off the new one. Have been looking to upgrade soon to an Intel dual core but theres also some bits I want for the Rangie too. What would Superman do????

[kaa45]

Sounds like the 500Gb drive is too big for that board. The BIOS updates don't list an update for BIG drives. Try it as master on other cable and as a slave drive, just to see what happens.
How did you install XP on it? (what was connected and how?)

[Debacle]

When I did the install, the old drive was still connected. Might give the guys I bought the drive off to see whether my bios will support it. Its not a great hassle but the next step was to put another 500gb in it and mirror the drives as a failsafe way to back up so need to get this sorted out first. Looks like I may have to wait till the motherboard/cpu upgrade happens.

[kaa45]

Did you install from a CD?

[langy]

Sounds like it has to do with having the other HDD connected when installing the OS - the install software detects that there is a master drive with boot capability during install, and the 2nd drive doesn't get all the necessary files. Try doing a fresh install of XP on the new drive by itself and run it till it's stable. Then, with the two drives connected as masters with two seperate cables ( I'm presuming IDE not SATA) on bootup you will be given an option to select which OS ( ie HDD) to run. Your DVD drive(s) will have to be dowgraded to slaves and occupy the 2nd connector on the ribbon cable, but it should work ( I've done it before with smaller drives). If the ASUS board recognises the big drive correctly you shouldn't have any problems.

Of course I could be wrong...

[ladas]

As said above I would remove the old drive rom the system, boot the system with your OS disc, but cancel install at this stage, this would bring you back to a C: then run Fdisk to delete the partition, then install a new partition.

This would give you a nice clean disk.

After cleaning and partitioning the disk, then re-boot with the OS CD and install the OS.

Once it's up and running - shut the system down, re-install the original hDD sgsin as a master.

then you should be able when booting up to press F8 and you should be able to pick which OS / disk you want to boot from.

This is nit the best way of operating but it does work.

If I were to go for a duel boot OS again I would have both OS's on one disk in seperate partition - software like partition manager can assist in doing ths.

[loanrangie]

XP will recognise large drives but show them as the 137 gig limit, installing SP2 will fix that. Try using the seagte sea tools as there are some good tools included that allow booting from other hdd and recognising large drives, or partition magic works well. I think that the new drive doesnt have the correct drivers to allow it to boot ?

[tombraider]

Computer is almost 4 years old, motherboard is ASUS A7V8X-MX with an Athlon 2.4. Like I said everything runs fine until you try to change the bios to boot off the new one. Have been looking to upgrade soon to an Intel dual core but theres also some bits I want for the Rangie too. What would Superman do????

That board should be ok with that drive...

Drop the Cable select and set them as PRIMARY and SLAVE manually....

Should be fine!

[Zakros]

The line "insert system disk." would indicate the BIOS did not found an OS on the "Active" partition of your 2nd disk. To check and fix this problem boot off you 1st disk and open control panel\admin tools\computer management. Select disk management and check the 2nd disk settings one of the primary partitions should be set to active just like the 1st disk

Zakros

[Bytemrk]

If you installed to the second drive, with the first drive still in the system, it most likely wrote the boot record to the first drive (As that is where the MBR is).

Assuming you have checked that the partition you are booting from is active.. As stated before, easiest answer would be to remove or disconnect the original drive - only leave the new on in place.. ensure your bios is detecting it correctly and run a new XP install.

You may be able to sort it via the recovery console and running a fix MBR

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx'mfr=true

But if it is a clean install on that second drive and nothing else.. might as well simply reinstall.

Mark

[MarknDeb]

If you installed to the second drive, with the first drive still in the system, it most likely wrote the boot record to the first drive (As that is where the MBR is).

this will be the problem Mark, if you still want to work off the old hard drive aswell as the new one you can make it a dual boot system (as i do, one for internet and general purpose, the other drive is for burning), there are several ways to do this, XP and Win 2000 can do it on setup or there are after market programs "boot magic" is very good and i have used it in the past (not with XP), do a search for "dual boot programs"

[HangOver]

don't use cable select on the HHD jumpers this only really works properly on specific boards.

Anyhow set to master and slave.

Remove the slave drive and re-boot
should boot fine, removing slave cheks that primary can boot.

if it doesnt boot still try swapping onto the secondary cable, your primary socket might be bust

[MarknDeb]

don't use cable select on the HHD jumpers this only really works properly on specific boards.

Anyhow set to master and slave.

Remove the slave drive and re-boot
should boot fine, removing slave cheks that primary can boot.

if it doesnt boot still try swapping onto the secondary cable, your primary socket might be bust

That will work as long as the new drive has a MBR on it, if not it will the same as he has now, But yes good point i never use the cable select on mine

[Debacle]

Sounds like it has to do with having the other HDD connected when installing the OS - the install software detects that there is a master drive with boot capability during install, and the 2nd drive doesn't get all the necessary files. Try doing a fresh install of XP on the new drive by itself and run it till it's stable. Then, with the two drives connected as masters with two seperate cables ( I'm presuming IDE not SATA) on bootup you will be given an option to select which OS ( ie HDD) to run. Your DVD drive(s) will have to be dowgraded to slaves and occupy the 2nd connector on the ribbon cable, but it should work ( I've done it before with smaller drives). If the ASUS board recognises the big drive correctly you shouldn't have any problems.

Of course I could be wrong...

Actually it seems you ae correct.

I went into disk management and made the drive active.

New error message "ntldr is missing" which means that some of the software either hasnt been installed or has been installed to the old drive as it was the previous master. Have tried the fixes from the microsoft website but they wont work because the bios will not recognise the new drive unless the old drive is also connected but then it only wants to communicate with the old drive.
What I am going to try is first of all set the jumpers to master and slave, then disconnect the old drive then install another copy of windows on a really small partition on the drive just to get all the necessary boot software on the drive and just leave it there, I have plenty of other space so it can just sit there.
I had already transferred 240gb of music video etc onto the new drive plus all the updates so dont want to go through a clean install if i can.

Here goes

[jik22]

This sounds like you have done the second XP install with the original disk still being the master - in this case, XP won't out the boot sector on the second disk, as it knows the first disk has one. If it was a BIOS issue, you'd probably get a hardware error as opposed to a "non system disk" error.

If you look in the root on the second disk you probably won't have things like boot.ini or ntldr either. XP needs a few files like this to boot an find itself, so to speak.

Is your intention to remove what is now the first disk, and boot solely from the second? If so, there a few ways to fix this, but probably the easiest is to boot off the CD once you have just the one disk in, then use the repair option to fix the boot sector and files.

[Debacle]

Have tried going into recovery console to repair but cannot as it just wont interact with the new disk so therefore cannot repair it.

My previous idea about creating a partition with a copy of windows on it wont work because disk management tells me all space is allocated so therefore cannot create a partition on it.

Have resigned myself to doing a fresh install, it has beaten me but have learnt a few lessons on the way.

Many thanks to everyone that has offered their advice.

[DiscoCam]

Hi John

Had similiar fun and games when changing my primary drive recently. If you can get hold of a copy of Partition Magic or similiar you can use some of the free space to create a new partition. Make sure the partition is at the start of the disk as if you put it after your existing partition it won't be bootable. Anyway, make a partition of say 5gb (more if you want all your program files on the same partition), fresh install of XP per the other comments with your old drive disabled, and that simple task:mad: you started so many hours ago is done.

Best of luck

Cameron