Help, Just A Damn Mess

[The_Watcher_911]

I bought a new western digital hard drive for my system seeing my maxtor hard drive was dying.

I have an old seagate hard drive running win 2000 incase of anything and as backup. I used the seagate as the OS in order to copy the maxtor HDD (which has my current file system with all my files) to the new WD HDD. I formatted the WD & was ready to copy the maxtor data to the WD data. Since my maxtor had an OS, it loaded the seagate OS as primary (which is should) but it didn't reconize the maxtor hdd because it had an OS also & I made it a slave.

Anyway I tried to install win 2000 on the new WD. For some messed up reason my key didn't work so i decided to try and install win xp.

Everytime I reboot I get an error saying ndfs (something close) isn't there & I have to press control alt delete.

So I used my seagate as a primary and the wdd as a slave to boot up. On the wdd drive it says I have folder "System Volume Information" & I can't get rid of it in ordser to install a new OS. This was very confusing.

Right now I have the seagate as the OS and WD as the slave & can't get of the folder it has called "System Volume Information"
Any ideas how to get rid of this so I can install a new system on that drive????????????

 

[Carobu]

I have encountered similar problems with multiple hard drives I have come to the conclusion that you simply can not unless your system is configured for dual boot have 2 hard drives with 2 OS's on them you'd have to de install the OS on 1 and then copy your files to the other then remove the hard drive with the OS and then Install the OS on the hard drive that has no OS then I believe all your files and you should have the bad hard drive switched out and the good hard drive in with the OS installed. The you might wish to have someone more experinced then me check out what I wrote I'm not entirely certain it would work. Keep in mind I believe this would work I would try this BUT I AM NOT CERTAIN THIS WOULD WORK. Please get a second opinion on what i just put.

 

[golfing22]

Dual OS hdds

You can really boot up with two hards drives with both having an OS on them, the computer will boot up with the Primarty Master drive.

Also, did you repin the Maxtor drive when you put it in the first time, if it was set to Master and you put it as slave then it would throw a fit and not work.

Anyways, so what accuatly do you want to do now. I would recommend using a drive copy program in the first place so you wouldn't have this problem.

 

[alidabiri]

as golfing22 said,
your hard drives have jumper pins that specify if it should be master or slave. the master will hook up to the end of the cable. and the slave to the middle of the cable. if there's conflict between master/slave jumper setting, they will not work. you can have multiple os's on the machine. i think the simplest way is to fdisk, format both drives, and do a clean install. but before you do that you need to copy or backup your files somewhere.