need help with hard drive 1

[curtsty2]

i'm working on a friends computer, window's 98 and it won't boot up at all. He doesn't have a boot disk or backup disk or system disk. I tried to use dos and use fdisk but it says it doesn't have one so i can't try to partion. so i put his other hard drive in that has window's xp home edition on it, it acts like it wants to boot up, but keeps restarting the computer, could the power supply be to small for the xp hard drive or could it be something else. please help if you can. his power supply is 250 do i need a bigger power supply.

 

[willir]

Attach the hard drive, as a second drive, to another PC. I will assume you have IDE, and will have to use "master" and "slave" device. I find newer systems work best using "cable select". On the drive, you will see pins with "jumpers" at the back. Look for directions for "M" or variaiton on master, "S" or varation on slave and cable select, usually "CS". Set the jumpers to "CS" for both drives. You will now need an IDE cable that supports two drives - system board end stays plugged into the mother board of the computer, the damaged drive (which will become the slave) plugs in the middle IDE port, and the good drive will use the end conneciton.

Your decription "it acts like it wants to boot up, but keeps restarting the computer" suggests that the XP drive is not the active or boot drive, or the system is not recognizng the master / slave drives. If cable select does not work, then try forcing the master and slave using the jumpers on each drive.

I would be surprized if this is a power supply problem - 250 wat is ample.

Provided the drive is functioning, you will be able see the slave drive using explorer and disk manager from your XP, fdisk and third party utilities. Disk manager, fdisk and the 3rd parties will see the hardware whereas Explorer will see the logical information.

This will allow you to backup any valuable data.

If you can not see the drive at all, then you do have a problem.

Assuming you can see the drive...
If you can see the drive with Explorer, then backup your data. Try to get a backup because any of these steps can result in destroying the data.

Strategies with the drive...

- Make the drive active with FDISK (becasreful here, you don't want to loose the second drive -- use FDISK to switch back) The Windows 98 may boot, and will not see the contents of the XP drive (FAT 16 or 32 vs NTFS thing)
- If you can get windows 98, try to re "SYS" the boot drive. Sometimes the boot files are over written (virus, and some hard drive management utilities)
- Try re-installing Win 98
- Reformat and reinstall Win98
- If the hardware supports it, try upgrading to Win XP. (XP is pretty nice to install)

Good luck on this one
Richard

 

[curtsty2]

thank you so much for your help, i'm going to try changeing the jumpers that might be the problem, if that don't work i will go the other rout and reinstall the win 98 then the xp. thanks so much will let you know how it went. curtsty2