Computer won't boot when old primary drive set to slave

[The Black Lodge]

Hi all,

What I am trying to do is install the primary drive from my old computer as the slave in my new (hand me down) computer.

I'll type what I have done so far in a sec, but my current problem is that when I attach the drive, the computer recognises it as a secondary drive after the memory check, but then before it can get to the WINDOWS XP loading screen, it goes to another black screen (a box at the top listing the CPU details, the primary drive details, the CD ROM details and the secondary drive details) and then freezes with a flashing underscore at the end of the secondary drive details.

So, what have I done so far?

Well rightly or wrongly I firstly created a floppy boot disk on my old computer, booted from it, did an "fdisk", enabled large disk support, created a partition and set the partition to active, and then did a "Format c:". Not sure if it worked as I've never done anything like that before, but it did have all the warnings about losing everything from the HD and I did press Y.

The primary drive in the new computer has the jumpers on Master, and I have been successfully using another secondary drive on it that has no jumpers (ie. set to slave) and used at the end of the cable. However, on this newly formatted drive when I remove the jumpers from CS Enabled to make it a slave and attach it to the end of the cable (just like I did successfully with this other secondary drive), the abovementioned problem that I described earlier happens.

Any fixes / advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[BestComputerGeek]

When you make a hard drive into a slave there are two important things you want to make sure you do.
#1 Have the hard drive jumper set to a slave
#2 Attach the Hard Drive to the 2nd port on the IDE cable. Slaves tend to work better when they are in the middle of the Cable.

 

[Naphtali14]

Yes, what he said ^^^^

You didn't mention whether you'd done either of those things.

 

[The Black Lodge]

Hi guys,

Thanks for your responses.

Firstly, the jumper is set to slave (ie. It's a Maxtor and I removed the jumper from the CS enabled slot, so according to the diagram that should make it a slave as it states "No Jumper = DS (SLAVE)").

Also, on closer inspection the drive was indeed attached to the middle connector when it didn't work. So what I wrote in my original post was wrong. Duh!!

Someone on another forum also wrote, "you cannot have two 'active' partitions on the same system at the same time. The partition on the slave drive you've fitted must not be set active - only the boot partition (with Windows on it) should be set as active."

Could this be the reason why it doesn't work?

If so, my question is how do I 'deactivate' the partition on the slave drive?

If not, any other suggestions?

Thank-you.

 

[BestComputerGeek]

It shouldn't matter what the active partitions are. If the jumpers are correct and it's in the middle you should be able to boot and see the files on the Drive....

...created a partition and set the partition to active, and then did a "Format c:". Not sure if it worked as I've never done anything like that before, but it did have all the warnings about losing everything from the HD and I did press Y.

Another thing I noticed is that you said it formatted "c" C:/ Is usually the default drive letter in Windows. If you already have a drive set to "C" it may interfere when you put in another one labeled "C" I'm not sure but it's an idea... I'm also not sure how this would be done, to change the drive letter...

EDIT:
I would also try to go threw the formatting process again... Something may have went wrong. You could also try a different format-er. I use to use fdisk like i believe you did but you may want to try going in with a version of linux and using a partition-er built into that to partition and format your drive.

 

[The Black Lodge]

Thanks Best,

I had actually thought about both drives being labeled C, glad you reminded me! If anyone can tell me how to re-label my slave drive to another letter given that XP won't load when it's attached it'd be much appreciated!

Thanks for the tip on re-formatting too. I'm a bit of a novice, so I might attempt to do what you suggest as a last resort as I don't want to stuff up my last working computer right at the moment. How would the formatter know what drive to format if they're both labeled C? Or wouldn't it matter?

 

[BestComputerGeek]

The formatter I use in Knoppix Linux tells me the two different hard drive sizes. If you know what size the second hard drive is you might be able to tell them apart.