Hard Drive Issue

[a1tone]

Hi

Hope someone can help.

I had a hard drive on an old PC with Windows 98 loaded and this booted perfectly.

I installed the Hard Drive into another computer, but it didn't boot up Windows.

Any idea's of what i need to do???

Thanks

 

[edfair]

Was it found in the new machine? Did it try to boot up?

What is the new machine?

Set master? slave? cable? what position?
40 or 80 conductor cable?

Spinning?

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[a1tone]

I took it out of an old machine and just put it in the new machine. When I turned it on it tried to boot, but came up as as invalid system disk.

The new machine, well its quite old. It'd for my mum, who wants a computer. Before we spend money, i thought see how she gets on with this. It's a Viglen Contender C433.

It is set as a master and BIOS see's the disk. It is on the end of a ribbon cable. One end in the hard drive and the other in the motherboard.

Thanks

 

[edfair]

The questions were to get an idea of what you are dealing with. If it is master and on the end and recognized by the BIOS it should start booting except in the case where the BIOS is expecting specific parameters that the drive doesn't meet.

Suggest that you look in setup and see if the drive specs are fixed or set for auto detect.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[a1tone]

They are set as Auto.

BIOS was set to boot from CD-ROM, but changed this to Hard Drive. There were several options HD-0, 1, 2 and 3. I tried all of these to be sure.

 

[vacunita]

Ignoring for a moment, the plethora of hardware differences you will have between one machine an the other which will moke the system close to inoperable once it boots.

If it is returning the invalid system disc error, its either not finding the drive to boot from it, or its not finding the files needed to boot on the drive.

Is there another hard drive connected to this machine or is this drive the only one there?

If BIOS sees the disk it should attempt to boot from it.


If you use a win98 bootdisk, can you change to C: from command prompt and browse the drive that way??

If you don't have one, you can download one from here :
http:\\

http://www.bootdisk.com

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[edfair]

I would expect a hard drive set for auto to start booting. If it doesn't, there are possible timing issues between what the old machine put on the drive and what the new machine can read. It isn't common but it happens.
Time to use a bootdisk and try fdisk /mbr to rewrite the master boot record. Then try booting again.

In those cases where I've run across drives that won't swap between machines I've had success by doing fdisk and deleting all partitions then recreating the partitions and reloading the operation system.

With your 98, had it booted, you would have had a series of "new hardware found" messages and a request for the install CD to locate the correct drivers. If the rewrite of the MBR works you'll want to start in safe mode and use regedit to delete the HKLM ENUM key and force a new load of all drivers. But you'll need the motherboard driver CD of the new machine.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.