Hello,

I recently had one of my hard drives crash. The hard drive I had setup(Hitachi Deskstar 160GB) as a slave had no operating system, it just had copies of a lot of data from the older, much smaller drive(32GB).

I went ahead and removed the old drive and set my secondary drive as master. BIOS sees everything as I would expect(of course, I am no pro at this). I have the boot order as CD-ROM, Floppy, Hard Drive. When I boot up with my original(bought it at Frys Electronics) Windows XP Home Edition SP1a disk, I do get to the Windows Setup screen fine. It asks me to read and accept terms, and asks which partition I want to load Windows onto. I select the partion and had it formated into NTFS(Quick) just to be safe(I had originally made the filing system NTFS when I first formated the drive after installation). It continues installation without a hitch in that it load all the appropriate files into C:\Windows and then says it will re-boot and Setup will Continue. This is where the issue is!

When the computer re-boots, it says if I want to boot from the CD-ROM, push any key.. I go ahead and do that, and the Windows setup screen appears again and the install starts all over. The first time I thought it was all part of the process, but then after accepting the terms and saying I want to install windows xp, it says an operating system exists on my drive and do I want to install over it.

What am I doing wrong?

Sorry for the long explanation...

Your problem is that you dont want it to boot from the CD. Let that part go after the reboot, and it will boot into setup.

Ben

EDIT: But leave the CD in...

This post has been edited by blsimpson: Jun 3 2005, 03:23 PM

Howdy and welcome to G2G:

That is your problem.. at the first re-boot, the needed files have been stored on the hdd.. Next time you get that question, say NO and let it boot from the hard-drive!!

Murray

I did that once too thinking it needed to do that, but after 10 minutes of waiting I gave up...should I just leave it set a while?

Thanks a ton for the quick response...
Should I go ahead and go through that setup window again and just tell it to write over the existing files or is there a better way. The computer is off right now.

Tony

Yep.. just start the entire process all over again..

Murray

All righty...I'll let you know the results in a bit...
Thanks again!
Tony

WOW! I started the computer without the disk on accident and the WINDOWS XP logo came up and it went right into the setup program(where I was thinking it should have went before). Now I am at the 39 minutes remaining point!

Thanks a ton to the two of you!

One last question...The old drive that crashed(made a lot of clicking noises and sounds like the internal disks are scratching against the surface) had some data that I never backed up(Outlook databases, etc.) Is it retrieveable without using a data recovery service? If not, would a data recovery service be able to even get the data off the disk?

You could try putting it in as a secondary drive, and see if Windows will recognize it. Were you not able to get to it at all when it was primary?

Ben

Howdy:

Ben is right.. Try setting it up as a slave on the same IDE cable as your master.. Windows "should" find it and read it if at all possible!!

Murray

To answer your question: sometimes it would.

...when I would boot the computer, it kept going through a "Configuration of hardware" for my system. The first time through it would only see the two CD-ROM drives. The second time through it would see the CD-ROM drives and my Hitachi drive, and the third time it would see the everything. When I went into BIOS though...it wouldn't detect the drive automatically, I had to tell it where it was and it would find it 50% of the time. Talk about wierd!

I will try to install it as a slave after I get windows loaded and then pray...

Thanks

Let us know how it goes !!

Murray

Okay...I am stumped. I have tried to install the bad drive as a slave and this computer does not like it. When I boot up, it acts like that is the drive it immediately calls to. I have checked the jumper settings several times with the same result. I can't get to Windows XP to determine if I can access the drive. When I go to BIOS and ask it to detect drives and exit, it can find the bad drive, detects it as the second drive, but upon re-boot it just gets hung up.

Any suggestions?

Which IDE cable did you connect it to?? Are you sure it is jumpered as the slave drive??

Murray

The Drive 0 cable is connected to the good drive and the drive 1 cable is connected to the bad one. Is that right? I have the jumpers set to cable select right now, previously I tried setting the good one to Device 0(Master - shipping default) and tried Device 0 Slave Present(Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 - 16 logical head settings: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/d7k250/d7k250jum.htm)

I set the bad one(Western Digital's WD Caviar: http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/ph...i=&p_topview=1) to slave. Currently it is on cable select. I followed the instructions from the link above to a tee.

Any other suggestions?

Tony

Okay.. bear with me..

Put both drives on the same IDE cable.. Now, set the new drive to master with slave.. Set the old hdd to slave..

Make sure the new drive is at the end of the cable and the old drive connected to the middle connector..

Double check to make sure the red stripe on the IDE cable is going to pin 1 on all connections - mobo, new drive and old drive..

Boot into BIOS and make sure everything is being recognized.. If it is, boot normally and see what happens..

Murray