New primary drive sometimes won't start 1

[ando42]

I have an old Dell Dimension 4100 bought back in June 2001. 1.0 GHz 384 Mb RAM and a 40 Gb Hard Drive with Windows ME. I recently bought a Western Digital 160 Gb Hard Drive and Windows XP home.

I installed the new drive as the master drive and loaded XP. The old 40 gig drive is the slave. After a few days I found that when I shut down the system and turned it back on the master drive wouldn't start sometimes.

My boot sequence is for the Floppy then HD then CD-Rom so I would get a message to insert a bootable floppy in Drive A and once it even booted to the slave drive and my old Windows ME started.

I found that now if I hit the power button to turn off the computer when it is booting and then re power it seems to work.

Any ideas or suggestions? Thanks for your time.

 

[garebo]

Win xp will sometimes install on the slave drive. Could it be that you have win xp on one drive and winme on the other?
And if so, could that be the reason for the conflict?
If you cant resolve this, then start with only one hard drive, install win xp, get it going nicely and then add the second slave hard drive after that and reformat it as well.
NTFS is the best format to use with win xp, although you can format it with fat32, choice is yours.
Dont do "quick" format, do full format. Windows will check the hard drive for errors, etc on a full format and wont on a quick format, and that could cause probs down the road.



Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[ando42]

Thanks for the response garebo. I did everything you said. I didn't hook up my old slave drive until the new one was humming with XP. I did the full format in NTFS.

My problem is more of the primary not starting up perhaps it is a bad drive but I was wondering if it could be something else

 

[ando42]

Also the problem only surfaces when I power down the system. If I do a warm reboot (i.e select restart from the turn off computer menu) it works just fine.

 

[garebo]

Could you have the power on\off jumpers on reset and vice-versa? I dont even know if thats the prob, just guessing really.

You mentioned "after a couple days". Think back, did you add some software or create any small hardware or system software changes?
Anything all all?
Do you have xp sp1 or 2 installed?
Also, go to bios and change your first boot to hard drive 0, not floppy.
Also, there is a setting in your bios for the system to not look for or recognize a floppy drive, set it to not.

We also need a complete run-down on your system
you are missing:
Do you have sp1 or 2 installed?
What mobo it is? What is onboard the mobo, sound, video, nic, etc?
What pci or agp cards are you using?
Does the system recognize the cpu properly?
You can also check Dell for faq relevent to your system, and check in the support area for other possible info.

Has your system recognized both hard drives as 40 and 120 gig?



Good advice + great people = tek-tips