Very weird seagate issue

[comp.learner]

I have a brand new Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 40gb ATA hard drive that has some issues. Well actually only one issue as far as i can tell, you the first time i used it was in a old compaq that has ATA 33 on it but it worked fine. And then i moved the hard drive to another old system, an hp i think, and bam instant issue. First i noticed that the post was taking forever to get over with and that the hdd activity led was just staying on. Finally it continued on and i had my xp cd in drive and went to boot from it, well after it said something like "scanning your hardware configuration" it proceeded to a black screen where it stayed for about ten minutes till finally the blue xp install screen comes up , with the press f6 to install 3rd part.... blah blah blah, it proceeded to load drivers which went fairly fast but then i had to wait another ten minutes after it was trying to load the terms and conditions agreement thing, so i tried all kinds of jumper configurations, different cables, different combinations with hard drives as slaves and what not. So i just put it out of my find for a while until i needed it for an newer computer that has ATA 100 in it and same thing occurs where everthing takes about 10 times longer than it should but it works fine on the compaq. Oh one more thing dont know if its important the newer computer which is a gateway and the hp have phoenix bios's while the compaq i think has some other bios thing.

 

[iss]

Hard drives with OS installe don them are not plug and play devices that you can switch from one machine to another. when you install windows on a computer windows creates the HAL ( hardware abstraction Layer) that is specific to the hardware on the machine it is being installed on. if you want to take the hard drive and put it in another machine that does not have identical hardware then you need to at least do a repair install of XP.

 

[Tedster]

you cannot use a boot hard drive on one computer on another. Windows uses specific files that are particular to the machine it was loaded on. When you move the hard drive, those files will not correspond to the new hardware.

 

[comp.learner]

Oh, you must have misunderstood me, when i moved the hard drive from the compaq to the hp, and then to the new computer (gateway) i wasnt trying to use the same installed operating system each time, each time i moved it i planned on putting a fresh install of xp but my problem is that the hard drive stays inactive or very active according to the hdd led, for several minutes at the end of the BIOS post causing what seems like a hang and then it will continue on but anytime i try to use a boot disk like windows xp, or a windows 98 boot disk the time it takes to get to the install part in the xp cd, or command prompt in 98 is so much longer. I also put it in another computer that already had a hdd installed with os on it as a slave just to see, and again same issue, hangs for a while at the end of post and takes forever to come up to the windows xp logo booting screen. After it boots everything seems fine, using speedfan i checked the S.M.A.R.T and it checked out everything ok so i dont know is this a bios issue or what, i have never had a problem like this and it confusing the heck out of me considering it still works fine in the first computer i used it.