Drive transfer issue

  • Thread starter Thread starter usafjayhawk
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usafjayhawk

I have an old drive that was my XP boot frive. I wanted to put in in
my new Vista machine as a second drive but it fails to boot up when I
do. Note another drive worked fine, but it did not have any XP system
files on it.

I suspect my only option is to reformat the old drive. Becaosiue it is
the boot/system drive though on the old computer (and the new computer
won't boot with it installed), how can I do this? If I reboot off the
XP DVD, can I do it then?

Thanks
 
Hi,

Simply installing the drive should not cause the system not to boot. As
David has mentioned, first check that the drive's jumper is in the correct
position for the location to which you have installed it (master/slave/cable
select). Also, recheck that the cabling is fully seated on both ends. If you
get through the system POST and Vista still fails to load, post back with
the configuration and how the drive is detected in the system BIOS.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
 
To answer both responses, the drive is configured for cable select as
well as the one that works. In the old computer I uses removable
drive trays so I could swap in different data drives depending on the
requirement. A 200gb EIDE drive served as the XP boot drive and two
80gb data drives that were swappable. All were jumpered to be cable
select as I planned (but never implemented) to have a Win98 one of the
data drives to support old software.

I took one of the 80gb drives and plugged it into the new system.
Worked like a champ. Copied all the data from it to the new computer
and then pulled it out and put in the 200gb drive. Failed some test
in BIOS somewhere and would not boot. Tried multiple times. Only
thing I can thing of is that drive is flaky. I originally partitioned
it into two drives...and then later had to reinstall XP. Somehow it
got goobered up and the second drive thinks it's the system drive
(that's what XP tells me when I try to re-letter the drive) yet the OS
is installed on the first partition. Never could fix that. Anyway, I
don't need the partions anymore as the drive will be 100% data, so I
figured I would do a low level format, clear the partions, and
reformat using teh XP disk...if I can do that. Which takes me back to
the original question...
 
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