[I love my vans]

I just bought a oldish PC from my girl friend, and i got a used 40 gig from another of my computers and chucked it in the new computer.

On BIOS the computer wont even recognise a drive where it is meant to be, it is not sharing a cable and the jumper is set to master.

Can i have some help, from the basics if need be.

Thank you (My First Post, Yea Baby)

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Welcome to GTG.

How old is this computer? 40GB might be too big for it if it's a very old motherboard.

Try setting the jumpers to cable select as some mobo are picky about this.

[greyknight17]

Welcome to GTG.

How old is this computer? 40GB might be too big for it if it's a very old motherboard.

Try setting the jumpers to cable select as some mobo are picky about this.

[I love my vans]

Right well when i boot up from CD i put in the windows 98 disk, and it cannot find any thing, however with windows xp it finds, and formats the drive, the file format it NTFS, is that the problem?

Cheers

[Hemal]

Does it recognize all 40 gigs of the harddrive? I think it could be new for the old computer and xp had the drivers for it

[I love my vans]

No, the BIOS does not recognise a single bit of the drive?

[Samm]

Are you sayig then, that the bios won't detect the drive at all but XP does? Have you run the 'auto detect drives' utility in the bios?

[I love my vans]

Thats right, when i run setup for Windows 98 it will not regognise the drive, however XP will?

I will try the auto-detect feature, im not sure tho so if you could give me a general pointer, for example look out for a setting called IDe auto-detect????

Thank you ILMV

[Samm]

Don't worry about the bios. If XP can see the drive, then the bios will as well. The reason win98 won't see it, is because its setup as NTFS instead of FAT32.

Which operating system do you wish to use with this drive?

[Spank_Me]

What Samm said

The reason win98 won't see it, is because its setup as NTFS instead of FAT32.

is totally true. 98 will not be able to see or read from a HD formatted as NTFS. If you do want to run 98 you will have to reformat the drive with FAT32, if there is stuff off the drive that you want, copy anything with a second cp first.

[I love my vans]

Thanks people, i will reconnect the computer and attempt to put XP on it.

[I love my vans]

Well thats is odd, XP cannot find the frikin drive now.

UPDATE: Well pluging it in might help

Edited by I love my vans, 01 June 2005 - 07:29 AM.

[I love my vans]

Right well XP found the drive, delete the current partition, created a new one and formatted it. Then it copied all the setup files to the drive and then it reboots, i intervein and go into BIOS to set it to boot from C:, but after some of the normal balck and white stuff, it says.....

Verifying DMI Pool Data...........
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

Whats hapening now?

[I love my vans]

Right well this is it.

The BIOS will not detect the HDD
Windows 98 didnt
Windows XP did, but could only reformat in NTFS, so when booting up it seems as if there is no drive there??

I think i will leave it for now, and take it into a computer shop to get looked at. Hopefully they will be able to find life in it, it isnt essential as i have 4 otrher computers in my house hold, i simply wanted to add another, im a very nerdy person.

Thanks for all the help.
ILMV

[Samm]

No, XP will see the drive if its ntfs. This is not the problem.

What you need to do is simple :

Boot from a win98 boot disk (floppy). When loaded, type fdisk at the a> prompt.
Answer Y to large drive support & Y to the NTFS question.
Select option 4 to view the drive. Look under the <status> heading, if theres nothing there, then you need to make the drive active - press esc to return to main fdisk menu, then select option 2 to it set active.
Exit fdisk & shutdown from CD. (remove floppy obviously)

Start the XP install again. (if you want to test the drive first, boot from the C drive instead of CD. The disk boot failure should have vanished. You may get a 'No operating system found' error depending on whether the boot files are present. Main thing is that the disk boot failure message should not appear. Then reboot from XP CD & start install again.

[I love my vans]

I did manage to get it into command prompt, using the in windows 98 disk and typed fdisk and it says no fixed drives available.