New hard drive not recognized

[Guest]

OK - as briefly as I can:

I have a Compaq Presario 5000 and after better than four years the original
hard drive failed. I replaced it and the new Seagate drive took off like a
dream and worked for about two months, and it crashed after a power failure -
wouldn't reboot and gave this error message: "Non-system disk or disk error,
replace and strike any key when ready."
A couple of failed attempts to get it working ended in the same message.
That new drive was out of warranty from the retailer, so I bought another new
hard drive (still wrangling with the manufacturer for warranty on the first
new drive!) - this time a Maxtor, and I went up from 40 GB to 80 GB. (One
friend has suggested that my system wouldn't recognize the larger 80 gig
drive, but couldn't say why.)

Installed the new 80 gig drive, and began the Quick Restore process with CD
#1 and then the Emergency Diskette, which restores the computer to it's
original factory set-up. Got this error message after the Emerg. Disk was
removed: "Error #1822/Error: No partitions selected."
In a second attempt to install the drive, starting from scratch, things were
kicking along, Windows came up for a bit, but after a restart, it stalls at
the "Windows starting up..." page.

Third attempt, a friend gave me an ME start-up floppy and we attempted to do
an FDisk utility. Somewhat in this order (we tried FDisk several times) - a)
it wouldn't let me delete partition or DOS drive ("No partitions exist'); b)
wouldn't let me create Primary DOS partition ("No Space to create a DOS
partition"); and c) (
"No logical DOS drives to delete").

Next attempt, ran Scandisk/all and then D:\\setup.exe. Failed. Further
attempts to do Quick Restore resulted in program Not asking to install Emerg.
Diskette, and then stalling in the middle of QR CD#2.

And eventually back to "Non-system disk or disk error."

I know it's probably something fairly simple in the end. Would someone like
to help me get my computer back in my life and walk me through this
hard-drive thing from step 1??
Of course, I don't have easy access to a computer - so an easy online back
and forth is precluded. I have to go to a friend's or the library to get at a
PC, and only for short periods. Posting here is cool; it'll just be a slow
process for me. I'm not sure if conferring on the phone is an answer, but I'm
willling to foot the bill.

Looking forward to hearing from some miracle-worker saint.

Kenny Gray
San Francisco
(e-mail address removed)
(415) 474-4828

 

[AJR]

Primary reason for the message "non-system disk...." is
failure to recognize the HD - ninety percent of the time caused by loss of
BIOS settings - other ten percent HD failure. Based upon your post info - my
money is on the BIOS settings.

 

[DatabaseBen]

Not sure what others may say, but is your bios/cmos recognizing your
harddrive? Is so, then it is compatible with your motherboard. Then it
sounds like your hd needs to be preformatted and partitioned before your
restore disks work. If your emergency disk was made from your original file
system, then it would have the tools necessary to do this. After it is
reformatted then you probably need to copy some files over to it. Below is
a copy of some text of a white paper. See if you can manage to get your
harddrive ready for restore with it:

-type the command

-at the C:\WINDOWS> prompt. Press the ENTER key at the end of each

--command to send it to the computer.

-To replace ntldr, enter

-copy drive :i386 \ntldr

--In place of drive , use the drive letter for the CD drive.

--To replace NTDETECT.COM, enter

-copy drive :i386 \ntdetect.com

In place of drive , use the drive letter for the CD drive.

To replace the Master Boot Record, enter

fixmbr

To replace the boot sector, enter

fixboot

The Recovery Console will ask, Overwrite system?(Yes/No/All). Enter Y for
yes

each time the question appears.



Then try your restore disks again.....


The next thing that would help is to probably reformat the harddrive

 

[Guest]

Both my friend and I reviewed the BIOS settings and saw nothing unusual. Are
there any particular settings which might cause my problem, and what should
those settings be? - Kenny

 

[Guest]

DBB - In my fumbling way I tried the suggestions you put forward and each
time got a "bad command or file name" message. I was a bit unsure of exactly
what to type in. For example - I typed C:\copyF:i386\ntldr - ??
Any further advice on that?
As to BIOS - I'm not sure what settings to be concerned with for my
purposes. It does recognize the new hard drive! I ran the IDE DPS self test,
which went through Test 1 OK, but stalled on Test 2.???

 

[Guest]

AJR - As in my respnse to DatabaseBen - I have checked BIOS settings, it does
recognize my new drive - but I'm unsure what settings are involved and what
they should be set at. Any further advice?
Thanks, Kenny

 

[DatabaseBen]

ok,
what needs to happen is that you need to manually preformat the harddrive
first, then copying those other files onto a formatted harddrive occur
second. Because your harddrive has no data on it, then you surely need some
kind of cd with commands on it. If your current system is winxp, then you
should get some winxp emergency disks made from someone elses computer to
use on yours. But possibly those win-me disks might help too. If not then
nothing lost but a little time. Ideally, a windows setup cd would do all the
work. Also, I think that harddrives, new ones at least, come with a cd that
will help partition and format their drive.

Firstly the harddrive requires to be partitioned using the fdisk command.
By initiating fdisk, you will get a menu. I suggest to divide the harddrive
in 2 halves, eg partitions. One should be the same size as your old
harddrive, eg, 40 megs and the rest of the space left for partition #2. You
will need to "create" partition 2 as well and not leave it blank.

Then after the partitions are made, they need to be formatted using the
format command. To use the format command for an ntfs file system it needs
to be typed as:

format c: /fs:ntfs
then
format d: /fs:ntfs

If you previously had a fat32, then use this instead. You can type format
/? to get help for the format options

Afterwards, you can try you other disks again. If you get an error reqarding
that your harddrive is unbootable, then you need to copy those additional
commands previously provided to for booting onto your harddrive. Like with
the ntldr. This file would be/has to be on a cd, like a recovery cd,
emergency disk or something. Then you would have to copy it from the cd
drive letter to the c drive letter. Maybe it would look something like:
copy f:\ntdlr to c:\