Today's Help Topic

[Elton]

Following on from yesterday....

 

Got the new machine today.

 

Booted it up to check it worked. Fine.

 

Swapped HD for my one. HD spins okay.

 

Won't boot into Windows Tried safe mode, etc.

 

Seems to recognise hd fine (tried it without and it reads 0000).

 

What do I need to do next?

[Elton]

Set it up as a slave - no probs.

 

Anyone able to help?

[Elton]

Basically, when I try to boot Windows, it flashes up a message too quickly to read and then goes back to the boot up stage.

[Mat Hillman]

if you swapped the drives so there is still only one in there it would need to be set as Master not Slave.

 

Only use the slave setting for a second drive on the same IDE cable

[Elton]

Done that

[Steve Randles]

Elton, You have a new machine, with a hd in situ all working?

 

Its surely just a case of checking the jumpers on the new hd are set to master, then setting the jumpers on the hard disk you are attempting to recover to slave, connect a power supply and ide cable to this drive and boot up.

 

If this does not work one thing I found a while ago was to change the ide connectors around, what I mean is to just change the positions on the ide cable of the two hard drives.

 

Another thing you can do is, if I read it correctly...that you can see the drive in windows but its empty? There are some system utilities on Tucows or cnet.com that will recover lost files from the drive, carefull with these though as you need to make sure you are recovering to a diffferent drive than the one you are recovering from.

 

I have a text document somewhere on ways to revive a knackered hard drive, which includes such diverse things as putting it in the freezer for a while! I dont think you need this yet but I'll dig it out later in case you do.

 

Do you not have access to a mates pc that you could try to boot it up on?

[Elton]

What I'm trying to do is make the old hd the C: drive in the new machine.

 

I can access the files by making it a slave, but would really like to be able run all my old programmes on there, if poss. At the moment, it just won't boot I've been told that I may need to make it a slave and then re-install Windows on it.

 

Trouble is, I've now realised that I don't have an XP boot disk, as all my machines have been pre-loaded

[Steve Randles]

Dont these "Pre-loaded" machines have a partiton with a system restore on them?

[chesters1]

if you want your old hd to be C then it must be set up as master and the other slave ,master goes to connector on the end of cable and slave on the other,you can veiw the message that flits p[ast using the pause button on the keyboard ,the space key lets it start again

[Johnny Boy]

Depending on what brand the hard drive is, what bios, and what motherboard you have, you could try setting the hard drive jumper to cls - cable select. This option is necessary for some modern drives when used on their own, ie no other drives on that IDE channel.

If you can get on line, it could well be worth your time to visit the hard drive manufacturers web site, and see what they recommend, before reinstalling windows etc.