Hello, I recently realized my 2 hard drives were out of date and I was running out of room so I ordered two WD 1TB 64MB 7200RPM SATA3 Hard Drive (WD1002FAEX). I installed windows xp and transferred all my data to one of them last night. Had no problems did the windows updates, installed my programs, and everything was going fine. I just installed the second hard drive today and the PC will not boot now, it gives me the message to boot from cd/dvd and will not proceed beyond this. The boot order is set correctly to the proper hard drive and I have tried manually selecting it from the boot menu. Can anyone help me out? I am not real sure what to do, thanks for any help!
It is. It's been failing to boot at the verifying dmi step. I enabled quick boot and the dmi said it was updating the next time I booted and then said invalid partition table. I just reset CMOS and now its stopped at the dmi step completely. I think there is either some kind of problem with the way the hardware configuration was registering or perhaps something wrong with the hard drive partition or something. I may have messed it up further. Is there a way to repair just he boot files for the drive with windows on it? Could I install windows on the clean drive and then is there a chance of accessing the messed up drive to get he data off there? Have to get to bed but please let me know... would like to start the windows install if I am doing that.
Yeah use install disc select repair,on win 7 i can't remember what command is used as an example on xp it is fixboot then fixmbr,web search will tel you what it is for win 7 or just type help in the command window & it will show on recovery screen,if you have no install disc but a recovery partition it works the same. edit:however this procedure unnecessary if xp boots when slave drive is removed
No, it wasn't booting no matter what I tried and I believe something got messed up either with how the PC was picking up the hardware configuration or in the hard drive partitions. Either way though I started all over from scratch and now have it all set up. I just reformatted both drives and only installed windows on one of them. I plugged in my old IDE backup drive just long enough to copy my data over to the new drives. My only issue is that the PC didn't want to assign the letter C to my new primary drive, I'll live though. Thanks for the suggestions/help ddp and scorpNZ.
My boot drive is H and my secondary hard drive is letter I. That is how it showed up at the screen where you click to install windows. I did see some mention of a program that can create a virtual C drive on an existing hard drive, so far I have not really had any problems with my drive being assigned H.
I do. There are 4 letters assigned to that as well as a dvd drive and a deamon tools virtual drive. None of them are assigned C.
Maybe this may help.I assume you are using XP as your operating system. I also installed a larger 1TB drive but mine was assigned the Letter C. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844
saulat, diconnect the card reader next time you reinstall windows so that the boot drive will be c:/ not h:/.
oh come on kids.. xp doesn't have sata drivers.. in bios select under drives "ide" and not "achi" mode.. or whatever it says now swap it and normal service should be resumed.. only other way is to make up a custom xp installer disk with the working correct sata driver for your hardware added.
JST1946 - It will not let me reassign letters to a primary system drive. ddp - I will disconnect the card reader next time I reinstall windows, hopefully that will be no time soon. ps355528 - I'll check that BIOS stuff out next time I restart however I don't recall seeing anything like that in my BIOS. I'll repost when I check out BIOS. Thanks everyone for the suggestions
Norton ghost 12 can change drive letter to c i've had to use it on occasions,it's possible other partition tools can as well perhaps easeus or minitool,both these two have imaging & partition tools for free
