Thread: New Hard drive wont boot

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?

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????

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?)

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.

Did you install from a CD?

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...

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.

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 ?