[xCraftyx]

This is annoying the absolute hell out of me. I have my brother's 40gb hard drive with windows newly installed on it. I can boot to it when it's set as a slave in my computer but I can't boot to as a master in my brother's computer. He has two hard drives, the other is a 20gb and is set to slave. The Primary Drive 0 shows up in the BIOS setup menu as Hard Drive and I know the windows install works. His computer is a used Dell Optiplex Gx240. What am I doing wrong?

[no2pencil]

What does it do when you try to boot it in the Optiplex? What error message are you getting? This will tell us where it's failing.

[xCraftyx]

Right sorry, when i boot it up it goes through the bios and the dell logo loading screen and immediately shows a black screen with the message "f1 to retry boot f2 to enter setup." if i hit f1 i just get the same message and then f2 enters the bios setup

[no2pencil]

I only can think of two reasons why it would not boot. But 1st lets try one other thing.

Try taking the 2nd drive that you have set to slave off the IDE chain. Oh, while I'm thinking of it, make sure that the 40gb drive has an ultra (80pin) IDE connector, & not that old 40pin garbage. It's possible that you have the wrong cable?

Ok, so back to the 1st statement. Two possibilities.

1.) Dell has it's own partition. I've run into this when duplicating drives. There is the restore partition, the OS partition, & a specific Dell partition. Not sure what it does, but it's on the MBR.

2.) crap, I forgot what item #2 was. I guess take the one I had before & fill it in here. If I think of what I was thinking of, I'll paste it

[xCraftyx]

It's not exactly a new computer, and the hard drive is a 40 pin haha so i have the 40 pin garbage cable. I don't think that it's Dell's partition because when i formatted it there was only the one partition on the drive and i've formatted the hard drive before on this computer and it has been working until now. It's the exact same setup as before i started messing with it and I didn't mess with anything else so I don't know wtf it is

Whoop forgot the second part, I already tried taking the slave drive off of the chain and i get the same error

This post has been edited by xCraftyx: 06 May 2010 - 08:16 PM

[no2pencil]

I was checking stats for the Dell Optiplex Gx240, as I was thinking if it's old enough it might have the 32gb limit. But I see most of them came with 40gb drives (& 512mb of memory). Anyhow, anything over 32gb should (I believe) require the 80gb cable. Try taking the one from the known working computer.

[xCraftyx]

I'll see if I can find a couple lying around. My issue with that is that this thing was working perfectly fine before this with the exact same hardware so theoretically I shouldn't have to change anything right? Well, working perfectly before my brother got so many viruses on there that I couldn't open any files. Figured it was format time. I'll scrounge for an 80gb cable though, I need the one in my computer. Worth a shot at this point

[no2pencil]

Well if you used it (the 40gb hard drive) before, then I don't know.

[xCraftyx]

I did. That's why this is driving me crazy. I guess my backup plan is to try installing windows on his secondary (20gb) hard drive and see it it can boot from that. I'm completely out of ideas

[debjit625]

Try this,take the 40gb HD and set the jumper as master,now on the motherboard connect this HD on the primary IDE connector(not secondary) install windows and see after shutdown if it boots,if it does then the motherboard is ok and also 40gb HD.

Installing XP after connecting the HD on primary as master makes a difference (on MBR) you cant use the system installed earlier for new hardware config and if this 40gb does not works as master then it may be damaged(not 100% sure).

May this solve your problem

Good Luck

[xCraftyx]

Thanks man, I know the drive is fine since it works on mine and I'm actually already trying to reformat with windows on the machine that I actually want to keep the drive in. Problem now is that it won't recognize the CD drive lol. Appreciate the backup now, guess I was headed in the right direction.

[calvinthedestroyer]

Hey, I read what was going on, here are my suggestions:

1> You said the drive had viruses, You probably still have a virus on that 40gb HD. I have ran into situations were a reformat will not remove a virus.

2> Do you have another IDE / EIDE PCI card? There is a chance that the IDE controller on your motherboard is broken.

[xCraftyx]

Nah the virus wouldn't prevent the hard drive from booting entirely. I'm not sure if I do, I'll go look though. After messing with the pin settings and all that, the bios setup utility recognizes both hard drives and the cd drive, it just can't boot from the drive that has windows or from the windows cd in the drive. Don't know what could be causing that since I didn't change any hardware or mess with the motherboard

[debjit625]

I am not sure but then also ,have you set boot device like "FIRST BOOT DEVICE AS CD ROM / DVD"
in your BIOS setup utility.

May very soon your computer gets well

[xCraftyx]

Boot order is CD drive -> hard drive -> floppy and it doesn't work. Thanks though, I hate this thing haha