Swapping over Hard Drives 1

[sadisticJ]

I have given my old pc to my dad and he wants to swap over the hard drives.
Both operating systems are xp but not that this is the issue.

He has a 'Seagate Barracuda ATA 1V 40gb' that he wants to put in the pc i gave him.
My old pc was running an 'Hitachi deskstar 120gb' of which will be the slave.

The problem is that my old pc will not detect his harddrive and goes to the screen where it asks for 'Start Windows normally' etc.

You select any of these modes but the system will just try to start up again in a loop.
(Hope this makes sense)

We have played around with the jumpers but with no luck although his hard drive jumpers are set to 'Cable select' and my harddrive is set to 'Device 0 (master)'.

Details:

The HDD are not fitted at the same time.

The original (40gb) works fine, this is then removed and the new one (120gb) is then fitted (not fine).

The BIOS is set to boot from floppy.

Somehow the second hard drive is not recognised.

Thanks

 

[tlcscousin]

If both drives are installed then the jumpers must be set properly.If you use cable select then both drives are set to cable select and the master is the drive on the end of the IDE cable.If your using Master and Slave then the one you want to use for boot should be set to Master and the extra drive set as Slave.

 

[sadisticJ]

Both sets of jumpers were set to Cable select and Device0 in different amounts of configs although the Seagate only has one connector (jumper) and the Hatachi has two.

The Hatachi illistration for the configuration of the jumpers says that both need to be in place to duplicate the desired config of the single jumper.

I will go back and play some more if this seems to be the right course of action.

 

[vacunita]

Hopefully you aren't trying to boot off the old 40GB drive inside the newer computer cause that is likely never going to happen.

Windows OSes are keyed to the hardware they were installed on.

Change to much hardware, and not only will you have lots of driver issues, but the Operating system will be rendered pretty much unusable. Additionally its a breach of the EULA agreement of the Os, and it will require Windows to be reactivated.

Keep the 120GB as master, and put the old 40Gb as slave so he can keep his files accessible.

If you really must use the 40GB to boot from, you'll need to perform a repair install of the Operating system and then reactivate it by calling Microsoft.

----------------------------------
Phil AKA Vacunita
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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[G0AOZ]

I think what you need to establish first is if the BIOS recognises the 120Gb Hitachi, on its own.

You don't say how 'old' this old PC is, but maybe the BIOS won't recognise a drive of that size? Look to see if the motherboard manufacturer offers a BIOS upgrade. Or just to test the size theory, see if the Hitachi can be temporarily 'jumper-limited' to 32Gb.

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[tlcscousin]

I am assuming the Hitachi was working in the computer before. I would also enter the Bios and ensure that the IDE devices are set to auto on Primary IDE 1 and 2 as well as secondary 1 and 2.Sometimes they are set if only one device is installed to Primary 1 Auto Primary 2 none.
As has been pointed out you cannot move XP from one computer to another without doing a repair install unless the hardware is almost completely similar.