Hard Drive Boot Issues

[Enkrypted]

I'm working on someone's computer for them and came across an issue that is driving me nuts. No matter what I have tried I cannot get the system to boot to the new drive. It's a Dell OptiPlex GX150. The original drive in the system was only 40GB and they had purchased a 160GB drive to replace it. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

The machine was upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows XP with an upgrade CD.

The file system is FAT32 (Other systems in the building this machine is linked to are on FAT32 file systems and cannot be upgraded to 2000/XP at this time)

The Windows XP CD is a SP1 and SP2 is loaded on the machine. Everytime I try to reinstall it says it's a newer version.

The machine cannot be reloaded because some application disks cannot be located.

So far everything I have done has not worked. The system recognizes both hard drives and I used partition magic to get the full size of the new drive recognized and copy all files from one drive to the other using both partition magic and maxblast. Windows recognizes the second drive and can access all information from it. Some of the other things I have done are:

Flashed the BIOS to the current version A11 from old version A6.

Checked both hard drives for errors with diagnostics disks. Both drives passed diags.

Went into recovery console and tried to rebuild the boot sector using bootcfg, fixboot and fixmbr.

Tried recopying ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini from the old drive to the new drive.

When I have the new drive set to master and the old drive set to slave, the system will boot to a screen saying "Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility.

Any of you guys have any ideas that might help me solve this?



Enkrypted
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[Freestone]

Temporarily remove the older drive. Then make sure the new drive is jumpered correctly for the only drive. Some drives are jumpered differently for stand-alone master vs. master with slave attached. If there is any doubt, set to cable select and place the drive at the end of the IDE cable. Boot into Partition Magic and ensure the new drive C: parition is set as Active. Trying booting from the new again.

 

[Enkrypted]

I actually got it working about a couple hours after posting the original message. It turns out the original drive had a virus that kept wiping out the boot sector on the new drive. Did a scan on the old drive and got the virus removed then recloned the old drive to the new one and everything works great now.

Enkrypted
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[Freestone]

Good find, and thanks for reporting back. Just curious, but prior to the cloning, was the 40GB bootable? I wouldn't think so...

 

[Enkrypted]

That's the weird thing....it was bootable....that's what was driving me crazy about the whole thing....how that one booted fine and the other wouldn't.

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