Mother of all Hard Drive Problems

[Mike]

This is a continuation of a problem I posted yesterday to
which several of you were kind enough to respond, but one
I haven't been able to resolve.

I purchased a new Maxtor 80GB ATA 133 drive to replace a
Western Digital 60GB drive that I'm giving to my son. I
am running Windows XP Home edition. I used the MaxBlast 3
imaging utility that came with the new drive to create a
bootable drive. The utility also copied all of the
programs files, etc. from the old drive to the new.

My problem is that I can't boot from the new drive. I can
access all of the files on the drive through Windows
Explorer. I can open programs on it, etc. I just can't
boot from it. I keep getting an error message, "Error
Loading OS". I am very familiar with master/slave
configurations, so I'm not causing the problem there (both
drives are set up as Cable Select). I have used the BIOS
to make HDD-1 (the new Maxtor) the first boot device, but
it didn't work. I also tried completely disconnecting the
Western Digital and setting the new drive up as Primary
Master with HDD-0 as the first boot device. Didn't work.
BIOS sees the drive fine, and when I boot from the Western
Digital, Windows XP sees the Maxtor and all the content on
it, so it's not a drive recognition or master/slave
problem problem.

Here is what I have tried so far:

1. Reran the the MaxBlast 3 imaging software. No effect

2. Downloaded and ran Western Digital's imaging utility.
No effect

3. Booted from the Windows XP CD and ran the Repair
Console. Performed the following commands with no effect:

Fixmbr
fixboot
bootcfg /rebuild

4. Booted from the Windows XP CD, ran Setup and
Installation Repair. No effect

5. I took the drive back to the store and exchanged it
for a different unit. The "new" new drive has all the
same problems. No effect

6. I manually copied the root directory files from the
old drive to the new one. Everything copied except
pagefile.sys, which the system won't let me copy. No
effect.

I'm completely stumped. If all I wanted was to use the
new drive as extra storage, all would be well. But I
absolutely can;t boot from it. Any help would be deeply
appreciated.

regards,

Mike
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Mikey]

Hi;
Those were the days of the "Simple Life" when...
....Maxtor as: "Master with Slave Present" at end of cable....if both drives
on same IDE cable.

W-D as: "Slave".

Forget the "Cable Select".
Nothing like declaring them the "good old IDE way".

Mikey

 

[RonK]

You will have to do a Repair Installation of XP.

 

[I'm Dan]

I purchased a new Maxtor 80GB ATA 133 drive to
replace a Western Digital 60GB drive that I'm giving
to my son. I am running Windows XP Home edition.
I used the MaxBlast 3 imaging utility that came with
the new drive to create a bootable drive. The utility
also copied all of the programs files, etc. from the old
drive to the new.

My problem is that I can't boot from the new drive.
I can access all of the files on the drive through
Windows Explorer. I can open programs on it, etc.
I just can't boot from it. I keep getting an error
message, "Error Loading OS". I am very familiar
with master/slave configurations, so I'm not causing
the problem there (both drives are set up as Cable
Select). I have used the BIOS to make HDD-1
(the new Maxtor) the first boot device, but it didn't
work. I also tried completely disconnecting the
Western Digital and setting the new drive up as
Primary Master with HDD-0 as the first boot device.
Didn't work. BIOS sees the drive fine, and when I
boot from the Western Digital, Windows XP sees
the Maxtor and all the content on it, so it's not a
drive recognition or master/slave problem problem.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like you probably had both HDDs
installed while booting into XP. If so, that would have been a mistake.
When used properly, you would install the virgin HDD, boot the MaxBlast
floppy, do the copying, remove the original HDD, and boot the new HDD.
You don't want to let XP see the new HDD before doing the copy, and you
don't want the new XP to see the old XP the first time it boots up.

At this point, a Win98 boot floppy may work to fix things back up.
Remove the old HDD, new HDD as master, boot from a Win98 boot floppy
(download one from www.bootdisk.com if you need to), execute the command
"fdisk /mbr", remove the floppy, and reboot from the new HDD. Note the
similar "fixmbr" command from the XP recovery console (which you already
tried) will not work -- you must use a DOS/Win9x version of fdisk. Try
that and see if it works. If all goes well, XP should come up as C:.
You can subsequently reinstall the old HDD if you want, but not until
you get the system back up and running as a single-HDD system first.

 

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

It could be as simple a fix as marking the partition on the new disk
"active". Boot the old disk, run compmgmt.msc, go to Disk Management,
select the partition on the new drive, right-click and select "mark
partition active".