NTFS Hard Drive Wont boot

[spikeangelfan1984]

I have a big problem. I recently bought a samsung 20 GB hard drive off of ebay and the seller stated that the HDD is formatted NTFS. which i dont know nothing about Hard drives in the first place. Anyways here is my problem. When i hook up the new hard drive the BIOS reads it but when it goes to the boot screen it does nothing. all i get is a black screen with a white line flickering on the top of the page. I tried to boot the HDD with a Floppy and CD and nothing. The Seller whom i bought the Driver off of isnt answering any of my emails. Can anyone help???

 

[spikeangelfan1984]

the Seller Emailed me and told me to take out the battery on teh motherboard and put it back in to reset the motherboard. i did that and its still doing the same thing. i know its not my computer because i using it now i am useing my old hard drive. When i reset the PC and the screen comes on and everything loads but when it goes to the next screen to boot it doesnt. and i cant get the HDD to boot from anything i am trying to install win98se on the hDD. i think its not working is because the HDD is formatted NTFS. so if anyone can please help that would be great. thanks

 

[DaveFarquhar]

If you don't care about the data on the drive, you can wipe it out using a utility called MBRWORK, available from

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html.

I can't give you exact key sequences off the top of my head, but what you'll want to do is boot the computer off a floppy with the drive in it. To be safe, disconnect your other drive so you can't accidentally erase it. Next use this utility to erase the MBR and EMBR on the disk. This will erase enough of the drive that Windows 98 will allow you to repartition and reformat it.

I agree with you that it's because the drive is already partitioned, and not that there's anything wrong with your computer.

Dave Farquhar

http://dfarq.homeip.net

 

[billy71]

Windows 98 will not install on a NTFS drive it needs to be Fat32. I have never used Fdisk but that might enable you to re-format the disk as Fat32. Partition Manager will convert ntfs to fat32, not sure about Partition Magic. Partition Magic will convert from fat32 to ntfs but not sure about the other way.

 

[spikeangelfan1984]

Okay here is what i did. i went out and bought Win XP proffessional and when i hooked up the new driver it still wouldnt format it said that the driver is damaged. So hooked up my old HDD and installed XP and hooked the new Hard Drive as a slave. So i can save files on the slave drive i still cant load a OS on the 20gb.i tried to do what you guys said but i really dont know all that technical stuff.

 

[garebo]

If i am reading correctly it appears that you are saying that this new 20 gig hard drive you bought is now working as a slave.
If that is the case i would guess there was never anything wrong with the hard drive in the first place.
For one thing, when you started, you tried installing win 98 on a NTFS formatted hard drive, which cannot be done. But that also tells us you dont know too much about this stuff, not being rude here, just the facts.
Consequently, my guess would be that the hard drive is ok, you just didnt jumper it correct or didnt use the formatting or install software correctly, something like that.
Since it appears that you are saying the hard drive is working as a slave in your computer then you can also reformat the drive if you want to. Course you would have to take the files off it that you want to keep before you did that.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[spikeangelfan1984]

You are correct i dont know that much about hard drives. but i do know when i install a fat32 HDD i can format it with no problem. But i wasnt familiur with NFTS formatted hard drives. But there is always a time for learning

 

[garebo]

Well, the guys and gals here will help you if you want to continue, or perhaps you are all set?

As for fat32 and NTFS, they are 2 ways of formatting a hard drive, basically the way the file system is set up.
All flavors of Win xp will accept and format a hard drive with fat32 or NTFS and new utilities have been made so that either formatting system can be formatted, read, partioned, etc, so now its a matter of what system you want. Apparently NTFS is more stable from what i have heard.
There are a few little differences, one in particular that i just cant think of right now. Fdisk that is on the win98 boot disk will only format a drive as fat32, but as stated there are other utils that will format NTFS, including win xp os install cd.



Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[BryanZ]

Just browsing here, but it sounds like a simple fix. I would have to look it up in my references because I don't yet have XP on my computers, but here is the XP procedure as I remember it. I don't believe that XP comes with fdisk, and if you are not familiar with hard drive architecture and file systems, it may be worth reading up on. They are really not that complicated. In order to use fdisk(FAT16 and FAT32 drives only) you would need to be familiar with how to run programs from a command prompt. Fdisk is very simple to use, but you will have choices to make that you need to understand before proceeding. The main differences between FAT32 and NTFS are 1. NTFS uses smaller cluster sizes, which wastes less disk space when files do not use the whole cluster. 2. NTFS supports the advanced file level security features offered by the NT-based operating systems, ie. NT/2000/XP. If you are running XP, I would recommend using NTFS. Sorry about the rant, now the solution.
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think that a system that boots to a FAT32 drive can access a disk that is formatted NTFS. The fix should be easy. If you can boot XP on the FAT 32 drive, you just right click on My Computer, select Manage, and go to the disk management applet. In there you can convert a drive from FAT32 to NTFS without reformatting or repartitioning. You should also be able to format and manage partitions on the new 20G drive once you convert the old one.
Hope this helps.



PC Load Letter?!

 

[bigdaddy76]

if anyone can help me im having a very hard time booting up my hdd for xp my screen stay black

 

[micker377]

bigdaddy76:

Start a new thread for faster response.