Can't read hard drive

[venisles]

Replaced the motherboard on an HP Pavilion 7935 with a non HP motherboard. It can see the drive and finds the boot sector, signals OK and then STOPS. I've tried repairing Win XP with the install disk and it does it's thing , but when it reboots it stops again right after finding the boot sector. I can read the drive in another machine with no problem and it is partitioned with NTFS. I suspect it has something to do with the way HP set it up, But I am at a loss. I also found a 4 gig non Dos partition ahead of the NTFS but the NTFS is the active partition. I hope someone has some ideas. THANKS

 

[Bobg1]

The non dos partition you saw would be the hp diagnostics, which are run first. Since it no longer is findeing the hp hardware it just stops.

 

[wileya]

have you tried fdisk /mbr
it destroyes the master boot record on dos machines
and makes it rebuild it.
i don't know if this works on NTFS like it does in DOS

 

[drdebit]

HP drive info in regard to a win98 setup-don't know if it's useful here:
thread615-453711

 

[greengeek]

Have you checked the BIOS to see if the boot sector is write protected?

 

[venisles]

I want to thank all of you for the help but nothing seemed to work so I put in a new hard drive and took care of the problem that way. Even after doing a low level format of the old hard drive it would not allow me to install a new operating system. It seems there is something there still looking for HP hardware. I'm still looking for a true low level format, not just writing zeros, so I can restore the old drive to like new condition.