Thread: New Hard drive wont boot

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/d...x'mfr=true

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

Mark

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"

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

Originally Posted by 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

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

Originally Posted by 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...

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

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.

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.