Help! trying to reinstall original hd with no luck

[mao045]

I have a hp pavilion 510w that had a 40g hard drive in it, i had bought a new western digital hd wd2000 and installed it in the computer acouple of years ago. ( by the way there wasn't any wrong with the 40g hard drive, just wanted more space)I went to put the "old hard drive " back into the hp and i can not get it to reinstall windows back on it
It will start start-up with my windows disk(xp pro , which it had originaly had)and go through the first steps up to the point of reboot to start loading of windows and then it goes right back to the begining of initial set-up

I've tried several ways of trying to get it to install windows, and even tried replace the ribbons etc.,etc with no luck !!!!!

 

[Nodsu]

Remove the CD from the drive for the reboot?

 

[mao045]

yes i did and itsaid no os found

 

[Rick]

It will start start-up with my windows disk(xp pro , which it had originaly had)and go through the first steps up to the point of reboot to start loading of windows and then it goes right back to the begining of initial set-up

Your boot order is wrong or your partition is not active.

Enter your BIOS configuration and change the boot order to specify your new drive as the first bootable drive.

 

[mao045]

i did already it's set to boot order hard drive, cdrom,floppy, network

 

[Rick]

i did already it's set to boot order hard drive, cdrom,floppy, network

No, there's something wrong here. Windows has access to your drive because it copies the files correctly. This means that your BIOS cannot find your drive's MBR or Windows is not writing a new MBR for you. Both of these problems are very likely a configuration error and not the hardware or software's fault. There really isn't any other possibility than these two things. So we need to figure out why your BIOS can't find the MBR or why Windows isn't writing one.

• Delete your old partition and create a new one. Reinstall Windows on this partition. This will clear up any partition issues you have as well as make a new, active partition.
• Double check your boot order again. If you are connecting your drive to a PCI IDE/SATA card or seperate/RAID drive controller on the board itself, you may need to specify 'Boot from PCI' or '3rd party controller' etc.. Instead of choosing a regular ol' hard drive.
• Triple check your jumpers. Many drives these days have multiple master settings such as Master with Slave Present or Single Master. Use the drive alone - on its own cable - and change your jumper to 'Single Master' for troubleshooting purposes.
• If these things don't work, do them again and pay closer attention. This might sound silly, but double check yourself as you go along and make sure you aren't doing things like installing Windows on the wrong drive or partition.
• Run a full drive diagnostic (Even though I'm very sure this isn't due to hardware failure, I won't deny it is possible). https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic7602.html

 

[mao045]

ok thanks i will check this all out tonight when i get off work
i do have the jumper on master and the boot order is 1 hd 2 cdrom 3 floppy 4 network
i have also deleted any and all paritions and created new one and formatted
but i will check futher tonight
thanks
mark

 

[mao045]

well Rick i took and checked the jumper and it is on the master position and i also checked the bois setting which is 1 hard drive2 cdrom 3 floppy 4 network
i also changed out the ie cable with a new one just to make sure.
i deleted the partiton and created a new one and fomatted , then took out the xp disk at the reboot point and when it came back up ofcourse the hp logo came up and then a flasing curser and about 5 sec. later it said os not found i also tryed a differant hard drive and came up with the same thing, but with my 250 gig hard drive it still operates fine.
i have never run across this before, and i have done this type of thing many times before , but this is a first!!!! lol
mark

 

[Rick]

os not found

It just gets more and more confusing, no? I honestly don't know...

 

[Nodsu]

Try a disk wiping utility to wipe the MBR completely. Or maybe you got a drive zeroing or "low level format" functionality with your drive diagnostics?

 

[mao045]

how would i change the "low level format" ???

 

[Nodsu]

You don't change it. "Low level format" means "fill with zeroes" for modern hard drives. So if you have an utility that claims to do a LLF on your drive, then use that.

 

[alidabiri]

if your cd is bootable, then it shouldn't go to hd at all to look for os. is your cd a legit cd? is it bootable? if it is, then it should auto-start and lanuch xp install process.
if the cd is not bootable, the bios, bypasses that. if the next device in order is floppy, then it cheks that one. and lastly, checks the hd. which find no os on it.
get a bootable cd. if not, do this:
1-get a 98-se floppy boot disk from here: www.bootdisk.com
2-start your machine with this disk and choose "with cd-rom support"
3-do "fdisk" - delete any partitions, and create a new one (fat32)
4-restart same as in #2
5-format the hd
6-put xp cd in cd-rom drive and navigate to i386 directory on the cd
7-run program winnt.exe. this will start xp install process.