new Seagate 40gig-Win98--boot prob

[debbieeees]

I'm replacing older WD harddrives with a new Seagate 40gigs on a number of PII 350mhz workstations. The first one I used the Promise ATA controller, to bypass any bios issues, and it worked perfectly. I'm now on the next one and I'm using a SIIG ATA/100 controller card. Fdisk and partition went fine, I copied the existing disk contents over, (like before) but on this machine it only boots to a C prompt. These machines are identical....can anyone think of what I may be missing? Configuration wise....Win98 wise...I've already removed the WD and jumpered the Seagate as master so its seen as master when the machine boots. Scratchin my head on this one. Any ideas are appreciated.

 

[Enkrypted]

When you said disk contents, what where you refering to....the floppy disk or the CD files??

 

[debbieeees]

I made a copy of the old WD drive. A clone basically. No problem on the first machine

 

[wolluf]

How did you do the 'clone' - particularly how did you create the win98 boot sector files on new drive? (what I'm thinking is you might have a 'minimal' msdos.sys file in root of C: - like the one sys C: or format c: /s creates. This would boot just to a C: prompt. You need the 'windows' version with its extra settings - just copy one from first machine if this is problem - though as first machine worked ok, may not be!). Hope this helps.

 

[debbieeees]

Hi Wolluf...I used (in both instances) a little program I downloaded from ZDNet called HDCopy. Pretty straight forward.
Your right about the msdos.sys file, it was minimal to say the least. I went ahead and edited it manually, attrib'd it back and lo and behold...works great. Funny thing is, the WD drive I removed I installed into a brand new tower and just when the desktop should be popping up it reboots. I can get into windows with SafeMode but not normally...go figure! I'm just setting up this tower for printing labels...very bare bones all Soyo system.

 

[wolluf]

The old WD drive will be setup for the hardware configuration in the old machine. You may not be able to get it to work in new machine without reinstalling windows. As you can get into safe mode, if you go into device manager and remove everything you can, it may correctly reinstall as per the new system when you reboot (probably take several reboots) - or it may not!

 

[debbieeees]

I made a copy of the original harddrive profile (on the old HD), named it 'new tower' and when prompted at boot up I answered 'none of the above'. Worked quite well.
Thanks again for your input, I really appreciate it!

 

[wolluf]

That's a good idea.