Swapping Hard-drive help

[Floodie]

Im swapping over an old 20gig hardrive for a 250gig drive in my parents couple of year old pc.

I took the old one out, plugged in the new one, booted up, went into bios, "found" the new harddrive, Set first boot to CDROM, inserted winxp cd, saved and exited bios, after a few secs I was in DOS and asked if I wanted to boot from CD?.. I wasn’t able to answer this as if the keyboard didn’t work (it does work i delete keyed into bios), then an error appeared…. I cant exactly remember it as im at work but was something about "drive error" or "cannot read drive" etc…. I could do anything to retry, quit or anything.. Had to push reset key

I think it could be one of the following probs:
- The cd could be dodgy. I remember having probs with it on my last build.. BUT when I tested it on my system it read the cd fine within winxp/explorer…
- Could it be harddrive data cable??.. Do you think I may have been using a 40wire cable and now MUST use an 80 for the 250gig drive??
- Is the error reffering to the cv "Drive" or my hard"drive"?
- Probably be a good idea testing the new harddrive as a slave on MY pc wouldn’t it I guess

After not getting anywhere I put the 20gig back in, booted up and all fine… will work on it again tomorrow night..

Any clues chaps?

 

[Dave_W]

Check your jumper settings as a start point. They can cause no end of problems!

 

[RobTQ]

DOS?? Think you mean that the BIOS was asking if you want to boot from the CD. Normally says something like press any key to boot from CD. If you do not answer then it trys to boot from the next device in the list which in this case was probably the new HDD. As there was nothing on the HDD it could not boot and then gave up giving you the error message. Sounds like everything is working you just need to press a key at the right moment to tell the BIOS to boot from the CD.

 

[BenWall]

Make sure your not using a USB keyboard as some don't work outside of Windows as they need the drivers, use a oldy PS2 keyboard for BIOS settings etc etc

Check jumpers as said, and you might want to invest in a 80 IDE rather than a 40 as you said, although I have not had trouble with the cables in the past.

 

[H182]

^As he said. If its a USB keyboard and u don't have a PS2 one around try looking in the bios for USB legacy keyboard support, or something like that.