Old hard drive, new machine

[William B. Lurie]

I have a number of hard drives, essentially clones.
My old machine got so intermittent that I bought
a new one, and installed my old drive in it, as a
'Slave'. The BIOS looks different from the old
machine, but isn't hard to understand. I'm trying
to understand the logic.

It boots to the Master, and I can 'see' and do copy
and file operations on the Slave, but every way
that I try to make it boot to the Slave, it reverts
back to booting to the Master.

Maybe this isn't the right group to inquire in.....
but it seems to me that it should boot to the Slave,
and that all the MBR and boot info is on the Slave
drive. What I haven't tried is the obvious thing,
namely, try the Slave drive in Master position to
see if it would boot there. Having gone to the
physical effort of installing the Slave drive in
a new machine, I'm just reluctant to take it apart
a bunch of times.

 

[Kerry Brown]

With many newer BIOS' there is an option in the BIOS to pick which drive to
boot from. You would have to go into the BIOS and change this each time you
want to boot from a different drive. If you have another installation of XP
on the master drive you could also edit the boot.ini file to add a boot menu
with the Windows on the slave drive as one of the options.

 

[William B. Lurie]

With many newer BIOS' there is an option in the BIOS to pick which drive to
boot from. You would have to go into the BIOS and change this each time you
want to boot from a different drive. If you have another installation of XP
on the master drive you could also edit the boot.ini file to add a boot menu
with the Windows on the slave drive as one of the options.

Yes, Kerry, I can pick which drive to boot to, and I used to do
just as you said, with my old PC. Doing the same thing with
this new machine, it starts of headed for the Slave and ends
up booting to the Master. If I set it to boot to the Slave,
and interrupt with F8 and select Safe Mode, it starts doing
the right thing (i.e., I see the full page list of files that
I always see for Safe Mode), but then it goes black and starts
over.

And I never have more than one installation of operating systems
on one physical hard drive; several drive images from various
dates, but never a second OS.

 

[DL]

If I read correctly you installed a boot drive from an old PC in your new
PC.
If this is the case it is unlikely to work unless you do a repair
installation of win.
ie different PC specs, drivers etc

 

[Kerry Brown]

DL is right. I assumed you had already done a repair install. If you haven't
then this is the problem.

http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

 

[William B. Lurie]

DL is right. I assumed you had already done a repair install. If you haven't
then this is the problem.

http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

No, I did no Repair Install. I gather that I should
let it try to boot to the 'not-prepared' drive,
and interrupt it along the way, to do a Repair
Install. Well, I'll read that Stevens article again,
but I was less than enthusiastic about the prospect
of doing it when I studied it before.

My "Plan B" is to make a clone of the new system,
and then all of the BIOS and MBR and stuff will
match. As time goes on, the old back-up clones
have less and less likelihood of ever being needed.

 

[William B. Lurie]

DL is right. I assumed you had already done a repair install. If you haven't
then this is the problem.

http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Friends, Repair Install, from the document, is no option
for me. It requires software that just doesn't come with
an OEM OS these days. Thanks for reminding me.

 

[Kerry Brown]

Some OEMs will send you a Windows disk for a small fee. It doesn't hurt to
ask. The worst that will happen is they say no.

 

[William B. Lurie]

Some OEMs will send you a Windows disk for a small fee. It doesn't hurt to
ask. The worst that will happen is they say no.

Excellent suggestion, Kerry. I'll give it a try.

 

[Paul Greeff]

Hi William

Nobody has mentioned using a boot manager in this thread... have you used
anything like that before and have you considered it this time? I use XOSL.

The first thing I would try is to put your old hard drive in the new machine
as the only drive - see if it'll run. I've done similar things in the past
and found that as long as the IDE chipset is the same (or similar enough to
work with the same driver) you can get into Windows and then sort out the
rest of the drivers from there. If the IDE is different, the wheels have
fallen off and don't bother to look for the wheelnuts! That's more of a
headache to get around than reloading from scratch.

XOSL has some nice features. I run Win98 and XP Pro in separate partitions
with a common partition accessible to both for data. Each "profile" can be
set to hide one or more of the other partitions so that there can be no
interferance.

PG

 

[William B. Lurie]

Thanks, Paul. Because of peculiar new rail-screw mounting,
I'm reluctant to take it apart to run the HD all alone.
And this new Compaq machine is causing me too many other
headaches. As we say here in Florida, I'm up to my A**
in alligators just getting all my old applications up.

I've saved your advice separately and will
give it serious thought when I come up above water again.
Bill L.