here's one - HD problems

[bobsalas]

I have an old P2 256 that the kids had been using. We replaced it last year and it had been sitting in th garage gathering dust.
Recently my PC died and I thought I would put this one into service as all I do is browse the internet and use MS Office.
I fired it up and noticed that it only had a 12 meg HD so I decided to replace it. I slipped in the 120 meg HD from my old PC and it failed to boot.
I checked jumpers and cables and everythign looked good. I reattached the flat cable to the 12 gig HD and the unit fired right up.
I repeated this process with 2 other HDs with the same results. I then took my 3 other HDs and reformatted them, and placed each one at a time in the case with a Win XP disk in the ROM drive. In each instance the message would say non-system disk in dirve, replace it.
When i looked at BIOS it showed the DVD rom drive as a primary slave and the HD as the secondary master although there was not information about it.
I would then recoonect the cable to the old HD and it would take off.
After 2 hours of this, I pulled all the cards out and toss the case in the trash.
I am stumped. But I feel a lot better.

 

[mainegeek]

bobsalas,
Probably the cmos battery was low. Some of the drives may have been jumpered wrong as well.

 

[kestrel1]

I would say that it was just the jumpers on the HD's set wrong. Also if you were attempting to install you needed to set the first boot device to CD/DVD. If the hard drives have been formatted you would get a non-system disk error. You should have asked here before chucking it out.

 

[wahnula]

Old PCs used 40-wire IDE cables, you could try replacing the 40-wire cable with an 80-wire. Connect only the HD to it, jumpered to Master, and disconnect the DVD drive. Oh wait. This is not a question, it's a statement. Silly me.

 

[edfair]

I hope he was talking about 12gb and 120gb drives and wondered if anybody picked up on the optical on the primary and the hard drives on the secondary. And what would that do if the CMOS was set auto on primary master?

It has been a while since I've experimented with switching things around to see what happens and I've forgotten.

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