lost my primary IDE

[Kevin Reagan]

I just upgraded from Win 98 to xp home. After
installation (which required a few manula restarts),
everything worked fine except that on boot up, the
message came across that the hard drive needed to be
checked for consistancy. The first several times I
skipped this step and went right on with the boot.
Everything worked fine...wireless, internet,
audio,..everything. Then I let the disk be checked for
consistancy....it found some files, about 4, that
it 'fixed' and then started to 'verify free disk
space'...it stalled at 94% complete and didn't go
farther. I shut down the computer, and restarted. It then
could not reboot...couldn't find the c drive. I tried
restarting with the Winxp disk in the cd drive, and
picked 'r' for repair. It said no hard drive was found.

In going through the reboot, it finds the secondary
master and slave (dvd and cd-rw) but not the
primary...the hard drive.

in going throught set up the bios finds and identifies
the hard drive as the primary master. both ides are
selected.
where do I go from here???? HELP

 

[Yves Leclerc]

Sound like your primary IDE hard drive has failed.

Y.

 

[Kevin Reagan]

would this allow the set up to find it and identify it?
It seems suspicious that it happened after
winxp 'corrected' some problems. I appreciate your
help...of course I am looking for an easy answer.

 

[Guest]

Y,

I think that the drive is bad. I swapped out an old drive
and it started up (in the old drive's OS). When I get
the new HD, I'll recover with the recovery cd that came
with the system and re-upgrade with XP. I have registered
and activated the XP...will I have trouble when I do it
on the new drive?

Thanks,

Kevin