Installing a new HD, how hard could it be?

[gadget]

I have an old system celeron 500mhz with 10 gb master and 40 gb slave running on 98se. Lately, my system broke, makes a loud noise so I figured maybe it's my main drive. It won't load my os. So I disconnected my master and connected my slave and changed it as my new master drive. Installed win xp and nothing happens. It just says windows is starting (still starting for a long time). How hard could it be installing a new hd, well it's not really new. Can someone tell me if the slave drive is also broken? Or am I better off buying a new one? Thanks.

[budz]

it's best to delete and repartition the hard drive before installing xp.

[redwudz]

Not enough information.

Did you do a clean install of XP? I mean, repartition and reformat your boot drive?

If you started with a clean HD, then you may have a problem if Windows won't boot. Try it again.

Since you didn't fill out your computer profile, I have no idea how much memory you have, your motherboard, or a few other vital items that would help us to help you.

You may have bad memory modules, motherboard problems, BIOS problems, power supply problems......The list goes on.

What steps did you go through to install XP?

[snafu099]

Can someone tell me if the slave drive is also broken? Or am I better off buying a new one? Thanks

While your post lacks information so that others may help trouble shoot the problem of no boot, it does tell us that the "old slave 40g drive" is working and does NOT need to be replaced.

1. system reconized the hdd. Proper capacity ?
2. you installed win xp. error or issues during install ?
3. can you boot to safe mode ?

It would seem very unlikely that the hard drive is the cause of the problem IF it has been properly reconized by the bios

One possible thought, If when you first instaled the 40g drive did you need to use software to write drive specs onto the hard drive to enable the system to bypass bios limitation of large hdd ?

[gadget]

First of all, I thank you all guys for replying to my thread. I have an ald HP computer, celeron 500 mhz that is, running on 98se with 700+ mb of memory, can't really remember exactly how much. Anyways, my son has been using this mainly for chatting with his friends and with his homeworks. Since this is so technical for me, i can't exactly recall what happened when I tried to install win xp.

As far as I can remember, it formatted my main drive and tried copying files from my cd and eventually just rebooted itself and tried to do same thing all over again, copying files from the cd so I turned it off manually.

When I go to the bios, it says primary and secondary drives, NONE. So I tried to disconnect my master drive (drive 1) and connected it to my slave drive (drvie 2) and changed it to master. That is when it says, SETUP WINDOWS IS STARTING, something like that for a long time. So what I did was disconnected the drive 2 and connected back again the drive 1. Now this time, it says no hd found. I even connected them both and it says OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND. Hope this helps.
Thanks again guys.

[redwudz]

Kind of sounds like your partition/format got messed up. I'm assuming you set the boot drive to master with the drive jumpers and put it on the end of the IDE cable (Master position).

What I've done when everything gets really messed up is use a Windows 98 bootdisk. Set your BIOS to boot from the floppy, if not already set that way. When the W98 bootdisk boots into DOS, type 'fdisk'. Delete all partitions. Make one new partition and then remove the boot disk. Do not format with the bootdisk. (Well, you can, but you would just have to format it again with the XP disc)

Using only one harddrive connected as boot, put in your XP disc. It should first ask if you want to format the drive. Format as NTFS. Install XP.

If you have done this and it doesn't work, sounds like other problems. Maybe something in BIOS. Remove your BIOS battery with the computer unplugged for a few minutes, then replace it. This will reset your BIOS to default.

Try the XP install again. If still no, maybe bad harddrive, or memory or power supply or motherboard or even your CD drive.

If you can read the model/series number off the computer, post it here. That would help us to understand a little more about the computer.

[snafu099]

The system bios may not be capable of reconizeing hard drives that large. If that is/was the case the drive most likely came with software that would write the drive specification to the drive itself thus bypassing the onboard bios limitations

If you have the software that came with the drive, try using that again to write the drive paramitors to the drive (if you can't find the s/w then download from drive mfg support web site)

Using the xp install disc with default choices most likely overwrote the drive parameters stored on the drive makeing it unreconizeable by your system.

If useing win98 boot disc to access and use fdisk does not let you "see" the hard drive then most likely your bios does NOT handle drives of this size and you need to use software from the mfg., create a fat32 partition and then install xp to existing partion. The xp install will only create fat32 partitions of 2g or less and even then my overwrite the drive paramitors again.

Using large drives in older systems can be done but it can get a little tricky in doing so

In a simular situation as yours I had to resort to installing the drive as slave in another system running xp and using administrative tools to delete the partition the re-install in old system and using mfg software to setup and format to fat32 then install xp to existing partion.

[gadget]

Really appreciate you guys helping me but my problem is I don't have a 98 bootdisk nor the sofware that came with my slave drive (40 gigs). I had it packed with my stuff as I am in the process of moving into a new home. This is a bit technical for me but it seems it's not so hard to do it. Anyways, I sent it to a friend of mine for repair. Hopefully, he can fix it since he is a computer technician.

Thank you so much again for all your help. I'll get back to you guys if he's not able to fix it.

[redwudz]

That may be the easiest solution. Hopefully, it's just a format/partition problem and not too complex.

Just for your information, you can download a Win98 bootdisk. Just do a Google search for one on the net. It's my tool of desperation when XP has failed to access a hard disk.