I hyave a computer on windows 98 that has a hard drive replaced on it the hard drive has been formated on another machine as the pc i am using has no Cd drive. However when i fit the Hard drive in to the machine that has no CD Rom I get No fixed disks present when booting up. What is going wrong.
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No fixed disks present
- Thread starter chetah25
- Start date
First, is the drive selected in the CMOS correctly? Should be either auto or user with drive parameters.
Is ther an autodetect in CMOS setup that you could use to see what is really connected?
You can have problems with primary/slave options. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.
Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
Is ther an autodetect in CMOS setup that you could use to see what is really connected?
You can have problems with primary/slave options. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.
Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
- Thread starter
- #3
so you installed Win98 on the hard drive while it was in the other comptuer, then swapped it?
I've never had luck doing that. I would put a cdrom drive in the computer that is missing one. Then, format again and boot to startup disk and install windows.
I've never had luck doing that. I would put a cdrom drive in the computer that is missing one. Then, format again and boot to startup disk and install windows.
Do you get a hardware menu at boot time, and is the hard drive showing?
From what you describe , the IDE channel is bad, the cable is bad, power problem with the drive, or the data cable is reversed. If the hard drive is showing in the boot hardware menu then the troubles are elsewhere.
There are also some hardware limitations that might bite like this, but I think they would at least show the hard drive, even if they couldn't access it.
You would have been better served to put a DOS on the hard drive along with the 98 install stuff and installed from the hard drive. But that is immaterial to this problem. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.
Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
From what you describe , the IDE channel is bad, the cable is bad, power problem with the drive, or the data cable is reversed. If the hard drive is showing in the boot hardware menu then the troubles are elsewhere.
There are also some hardware limitations that might bite like this, but I think they would at least show the hard drive, even if they couldn't access it.
You would have been better served to put a DOS on the hard drive along with the 98 install stuff and installed from the hard drive. But that is immaterial to this problem. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.
Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
tlcscousin
Technical User
Is the hard drive formatted as a system disk.In other words is it active? A regular format wont help one iota if there is no system files put on it. No system files=no drive found
Put a startup disk in the drive, boot to the clean a prompt and type sys c: or run fdisk and make the partition active.
Put a startup disk in the drive, boot to the clean a prompt and type sys c: or run fdisk and make the partition active.
You cant really take a harddrive off of one computer and stick it in another computer without changing anything and just hope it works. It might and it might not. At best you will get poor results. The hardware is probably different on each computer. Try going into the bios and making sure the computer is trying to boot from the new harddrive. You should also try the auto configure setup for the harddrive. This tells the bios/motherboard how to read the harddrive. It will also tell you if the harddrive is on eide 0,1,2 or 3, which you need to know to tell the bios what to boot from. Then use fdisk to see if you can see the harddrive. fdisk.exe is on the emergency boot disk for your OS. Make sure your hard drive is marked as a bootable partition. If you have 2 drives one is bootable and one is not normally. You may also have to reformat the drive. If you can read the drive and it is not bootable it may not have the system files on it. There is a command called SYS.exe that can add the system files to the disk.
It may not be on the bootable floppy you have. You could copy it from another computer. SYS A: C: should copy make the drive bootable. But it has to be same version of the same operating system on the emergency boot disk. The only other alternative is to reformat the Harddrive with
format C:/s (/s puts the system files on it). If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.
It may not be on the bootable floppy you have. You could copy it from another computer. SYS A: C: should copy make the drive bootable. But it has to be same version of the same operating system on the emergency boot disk. The only other alternative is to reformat the Harddrive with
format C:/s (/s puts the system files on it). If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.
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