Hard Drive Issues!

[ARV_O]

whats up?

i put an old ata66 15gb in an older PII system (440LX chipset) that has WinXp on an ata33 4.3gb.

they are both on the same IDE channel with an 80 conductor cable.

the mobo only supports ata33.... i was under the impression that the channel will work at the speed of the slow drive on that channel, in my case the ata33 drive.

i boot up... and bios has no problem detecting the drive, yet it cant find the boot sector of my ata33 drive.

that leaves me to 2 questions:
1) what up wit dat?
2) any work around suggestions?


Arv-

 

[MrGaribaldi]

:wave: Hello & Weclome to TechSpot :wave:

Are you sure that the drive with XP is set as primary master (or at least as first boot in the BIOS)?
Check the jumpers on the drives to make sure...

If that doesn't help, try connecting each drive with it's own cable to their respective IDE channels.
Make sure that the XP drive is on the primary channel.

If that doesn't work, what was the XP drive used as before? Was it C:\, or another drive letter? If another letter, was it just another partition, or another physical drive?

The reason I ask is that if it was a secondary drive, all the boot information will be on the original primary drive... And as such, we'll have to create the files needed for it to boot... (mbr, and ntbootloader)'


If you'd be so kind as to tell us the above, we'll do our best to help you

 

[ARV_O]

all the way from oslo!! thanks for your reply dude...

actually, i plugged in that drive into my new computer... and turns out the SMART mechanism reported it as a bad HD. so my old drive was crapped out. oh well!

I will retrieve the data offf that drive and just do a clean install on the ata66 drive. BUT!!!!

with a clean drive i flip on the computer and try to boot from my cd rom.. but i get a NTLDR missing.

i saw something about booting up with a win98 disk or something on Microsoft support pages. i dont have a floppy drive in that old computer... so i was hoping you can give me some suggestions on a work around of the "NTLDR is missing"

Arv-

 

[Nodsu]

"NTLDR is missing" means that the computer is trying to boot from the HD. You have to enable booting from CDROM in BIOS or change the boot order so that CDROM comes before HD. That is if the machine supports booting from CD at all. Installing a floppy drive is not a big deal, so you may just borrow it from some other computer.

 

[poertner_1274]

You can get a bootdisk at www.bootdisk.com

This is a very good site to check out.

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Hehe poertner, bootdisks are very useful when you don't have a floppy drive :giddy:

If you have a writable CD-drive, you could burn a bootable CD out of a floppy however.

 

[poertner_1274]

Oops, I must have misread that part.

But it is still a good site