Problem booting to hard drive

[abakedapplepie]

I am in the process of setting up a computer for my girlfriend. As far as specs, its an AMD 650 from '00. I took my spare 60g hard drive to use in it, and I've had nothing but problems ever since. The BIOS identifies the disk fine. I went to install windows and everything went swimmingly, until after it copied over the files and rebooted to enter the installation phase of setup, when it boots off the hard drive. At that point it waited a bit then said "Error loading operating system" ever since that point I've been nothing but frustrated. I just cannot get the computer to boot off the hard drive. I can use the hard drive perfectly fine, it was my secondary drive for a while and it still works in my own computer. I havent tried booting off of it yet, but i suspect the issue is with the drive and not the motherboard because it has no problems booting from a cd drive or a smaller (500mb) hard drive. I even tried installing windows on another machine and then throwing it into the computer in question and it still doesn't boot. I went into the recovery console on the setup disk and did fixmbr and it still wont boot. I then tried fiddling in knoppix and the drive isnt auto mounted like other drives do in knoppix (im fairly novice in linux so bare with me) I eventually was able to mount it myself, but that was after i repartitioned the drive in linux too. I can't seem to mount it fresh off the windows install (well, the point where windows copies all the files from the cd drive to the hard drive) and also, I get errors in linux when i do "dmesg"; it says "hda: status error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest } hda: drive not ready for command" I looked this error up on the net and it seems fairly generic, spanning from cd drives to compact flash cards.

Please, is there anything anyone can think of that I can do to make this work? This is the only hard drive I have to use in this computer and I feel bad because my girlfriend spent money to buy a power supply and now she doesn't have a computer to use to show for that money.

 

[garebo]

Well, heres something you can try. Get a win98 boot disk and boot to a:\. Then use fdisk to partition and reformat the drive, and dont forget to make it active.
This is just one way to make sure the drive is good for sure.
YOu didnt mention os but i do believe you are trying to install win xp so then try installing win xp, even though you have formatted fat32 as when you first start the win xp install win xp will ask if you want the h drive done quick or standard (slower) method, choose the slower(full) method. It also asks if you want fat32 or NTFS, choose NTFS. If all goes well then you are off to the races.
Also make sure you are using a good ide cable and the jumper setting is correct.
You could also run the correct diagnostic floppy for the drive that you can download from the drive mfgr. I would do that first, not to partition the drive, maybe just write zeroes to it, then do the fdisk, format, and make partition active, all from fdisk, and finally the win xp install. I just did an install last night using this method when i was having problems with the hard drive.
Now this is all presuming that the bios of that motherboard is actually seeing and recognizing the full 60 gigs of that hard drive. If not, then you will have to try a bios upgrade or a smaller hard drive, or a pci ultra controller card, but thats the next step if the first fails.





Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[abakedapplepie]

Thanks, I'll try zeroing. And yes, the BIOS sees all 60 gigs.

 

[garebo]

Great, then just go ahead with the zeroing and the fdisk partition and format and then the win xp install and all should be well.
Of course, win xp is very hard to get going. Its very tough on hardware. Some hardware, like ram, h drives, etc, are ok with win98se but win xp doesnt like them and wont install. this does happen and you just have to keep replacing parts until win xp is happy. Course having just one ram, video, cdrom, the minimum to install win xp is the best way to go.
Leave all the extra stuff for after win xp is installed and running!
I have been a past critic of windows (95,98,98se) so i say in all fairness that win xp is a terrific microsoft operating system, just fantastic!! Very solid. Many different install and repair options, very happy with it! Hows that, Bill!



Good advice + great people = tek-tips