Problem installing a new hard drive.

[denverbill]

OK, so this weekend, I decided to do a little upgrade on one of our PC's at home and replace a 40 gb drive with a 160 gb drive. We wanted to turn the 160 gb drive into the master/boot drive and eventually clean off the 40 gb drive and just keep it for extra storage. So I followed the instructions that came with the drive (Maxblaster software). It copied the data from the 40 to the 160 just fine. However, when I went to reboot, I couldn't get the machine to reboot. No matter which drive I hooked up to the master position on the cable, alone or with the other drive, no matter what jumper settings I tried (usually cable select), I couldn't get either drive to boot. Both drives were still functional (I tested them on another pc) and both had all the data. I finally got the machine booted by attempting to reinstall XP from a Dell CD (the machine is a Compaq, but I had no recovery CD), but it's booting to the old 40 gig drive (which it labeled F rather than C) and my C drive is now the 160 gig drive. Unfortunately, something about the recovery seems to have messed up the internet connection too.

I'm about 99% sure that the 160 gig drive has all the data and all the correct XP setup information so that if I could get the machine to boot to that drive rather than the 40 gig drive, I'd be all set, but I have no clue how to get the machine to boot to it. Whenever I set it as the master, I just get a message like "invalid boot drive" when I try to reboot.

Any ideas?

[bemildred]

1. So you have a special cable? nt

[denverbill]

2. OK, I'm not sure I understand your question.

The only cable we are using is the IDE cable that connect the hard drives to the motherboard, the cable with the 40 pin connectors. It has a black plug for the 'master' and a grey one for the 'slave' drive. When we ran the setup, we configured the new drive as the slave and ran the copying software which copied all the software from the old to the new drive. I think it may have also somehow renamed the old drive as 'F' and the new one as 'C'. I think what was supposed to happen was the new drive would then be installed as the 'C' drive on the master connector, and the old one would be the 'F' drive, and the computer would boot up to the 'C' drive.

I'm not sure what special cable you are referring to.

[HamstersFromHell]

3. By special cable...

they are referring to the fact you should never have to jumper the drives as "cable select" unless you have an IDE cable for that purpose. Your "normal" 40/80 conductor IDE cable uses the master/slave jumper settings only.

Since you have the files copied, remove the 40 gig from the system...XP's already screwed up and relabeled it as drive F because it sees the C letter assignment taken by the drive which is "master" on IDE 0. Now that it's booted it as F, it's probably also rewritten a lot of registry entries referencing drive C to F. (Yes, not all windows software does it right and references %cat_root% or whatever it's called.)

Next take and boot the repair CD and select whatever M$ is calling manual repair from console. (Not emergency disk.)

Once there, run FDISK and check to see if the drive is marked "active"...if not, set it to active. Then run FDISK /MBR to rewrite the master boot record to the drive. Exit the console and reboot. Hopefully it should work now.

[bemildred]

4. Yes.

Listen to this guy.

[denverbill]

7. I think the installation software (Maxblast) had an mbr repair option.

It didn't explain very well what that did, so I didn't want to mess anything up and didn't use it.

Is one /mbr pretty much like another or do you think I might be better off using the /mbr repair tool that came with the hard drive?

Thanks for you help!

[denverbill]

18. See #17. nt

[bemildred]

5. Additional dialog:

I have seen cables marked with master and slave connectors where
that in fact was bullshit. I would be surprised if that is not the
case here. Generally a special cable is wired differently, like
floppy cables, not straight through like normal IDE cables, so if
it appears to be wired straight through, I think it would be "normal".

(Caveat: I have never seen a special cable, that's why I asked.)

One generally wants 80-wire cables (40-pin) these days to take
advantage of high-speed disk drivers that use them (Ultra-ATA
variants).

[denverbill]

6. I'm assuming then that I just have a regular cable.

I can't imagine Compaq equipping it's middle of the line PC's with any special sorts of cables, or Maxtor giving them away with their hard drives.

I guess from the instructions, I came off with the impression that if you chose cable select and cable select wasn't what was used on the other drive, that it wouldn't work. And since that was the default configuration for the jumpers and their recommended configuration, that's what we used. That was probably my first mistake.

[bemildred]

8. Sounds right.

For cable select to work you need the special cable and
both drives configured with the cable select option
and neither of the Master or Slave options (in theory).

I just bought a 120G and I had to remove that jumper, FWIW.

[jayfish]

10. You Do Not...

need a special cable to use the cable select option. You do need to set both drives to CS via jumpers. On a three-plug cable, the master goes on the outside connector and the slave on the innermost connector. On an 80-lead (40-pin) cable the connector that goes to the motherboard is usually blue.

Jay

[bemildred]

11. Opinions will vary:

I've never used it myself, but

An alternative to the standard master/slave jumpering system used in the vast majority of PCs is the use of the cable select system. As the name implies, with this system the cable--or more correctly, which connector on the cable a device is attached to--determines which device is master and which is slave. The goal of cable select is to eliminate having to set master and slave jumpers, allowing simpler configuration.

To use cable select, both devices on the channel are set to the "cable select" (CS) setting, usually by a special jumper. Then, a special cable is used. This cable is very similar in most respects to the regular IDE/ATA cable, except for the CSEL signal. CSEL is carried on wire #28 of the standard IDE/ATA cable, and is grounded at the host's connector (the one that attaches to the motherboard or controller). On a cable select cable, one of the connectors (the "master connector") has pin #28 connected through to the cable, but the other (the "slave connector") has an open circuit on that pin (no connection). When both drives on the channel are set cable select, here's what happens:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCS-c.html

[jayfish]

12. But You Forgot.

"Universality: All 80-conductor IDE/ATA cables support cable select (or at least, all of the ones that are built to meet the ATA standards). This means there's no confusion over what cables support the feature, and no need for strange "Y-cables" and other non-standard solutions."

But that's ok. I'm not trying to bah-humbug ya. I'm just trying to save you some time and money.

Jay

[jayfish]

9. You Have Hosed Up Your System Pretty Good.

The easiest, but not necessarily the best, way to remedy the situation is to wipe your 160, disconnect your 40 then install XP on your 160. Once the install is complete you can reconnect your 40, re-assign drive letters and move all of your personal files over to the 160. It sounds like your boot.ini file did not make it over to the 160 when you did your file copy. It could also have been corrupted or given incorrect permissions during the copy. To make matters worse you overwrote your good boot.ini by performing an "in-place upgrade" on your 40. That's usually not a problem but it sounds like you left your 40 connected as the slave drive. Thats why XP is installed on F:. There are some other options but they may not be worth your effort. If your adamant about trying to "fix" your system another way, let me know and I'll help out as best I can.

Jay

[denverbill]

13. I hope not.

I just followed Maxtor's instructions, since they had instructions for doing exactly what I was trying to do. Their instructions weren't great, but I thought I was following them correctly, right up until my computer wouldn't reboot anyway.

The only thing you mentioned that wasn't right was that when I did the 'in place upgrade' (I assume you mean when I was trying to repair Windows with the Dell CD) the only drive I had in the system was the 40 gig, so it was the master. I'm sure you're right about messing up the original boot.ini file on the 40 gig drive, but I'm hoping the it's still in place, as copied, on the 160, but it just isn't being accessed for some reason, or else that it's copied somewhere in a restore point. I'll copy it off to disk before I do anything else tonight. I'll probably try Hamsters suggestion above first to see if that works. If not, I've still got 2 good copies of our data files anyway, so wiping everything and starting from scratch is still an option.

[jayfish]

14. If It's Still On Your

160 (boot.ini) you can open it up in notepad and have a look. You may also want to give "full control" of the file to "everyone" and try to boot from the 160 again. A couple of questions though: when you did the upgrade was your 40 the master drive on the primary or secondary IDE channel? Also do you have more than one optical drive?

Jay

[denverbill]

15. Here's what I found.

One the 160, there was a boot.ini but it looked too new to be uncorrupted. However, there was a file called boot.ini.backup that was created the morning before the data transfer. Both boot.ini files on the 40 gig were too new to be useful.

During the upgrade, the 40 was the master on the primary IDE channel. We only have one CD drive. There was an empty partition on the 40 gig drive that was labeled D (the CD was E, which I assume is why the program renamed the 40 to F {next available letter}).

There was almost no difference between any of the boot.ini files, either on the new or old hard drive, or even compared to the boot.ini file on the other Compaq I own which is very similar to the busted one. The only difference I could see was that the new one had 'timeout=1' as the 2nd line, and the others omitted it.

[jayfish]

16. Possible Quick Fix.

It's a long-shot, but it just might work. Disconnect the 40 and make the 160 primary master. Now run an upgrade from the XP CD just like you did earlier. If I remember correctly XP will have to find a previous installation of the OS to run this. If it does not detect a previous install you will want to try reconnecting and rebooting to the 40. Rename boot.ini to boot.ini.cur (the .cur designating the current file) and boot.ini.backup to boot.ini. Disconnect the 40 and make the 160 master, again. :freak: Now try the upgrade.

Then again you could just wipe the 160 and re-install. Back in the day I would try to fix it, but these days I just start from scratch. I have neither the time nor Patience.

Jay

[denverbill]

17. Where I'm at.

OK, so I tried this. I yanked the 40 gig and installed the 160 gig with a master jumper config and put it on the master plug of the cable, just in case. I left the 40 gig out totally. I tried to reboot directly once again, just in case (hey, it works often enough).

Here is the exact message I got.
Could not start because of computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from selected boot disk. Check boot path and hardware. Check windows configuration and hardware reference manuals for info.

My boot priorities were CD, hard drive, floppy, and there was no CD or floppy in at the time.

So, I rebooted with the Maxblaster CD. I ran the 'fix mbr' option. Rebooted. Same message. I then put the Dell (remember, this is a Compaq PC) CD in and tried to run repair. I chose the console mode and it booted to DOS. I entered fdisk and it gave me an invalid command message. I hit help and it listed all the available commands and fdisk wasn't among them. fixboot and fixmbr were, so I ran those and rebooted. Same result.

I then swapped back and put the 40 gig in as master, 160 as cable select and rebooted. I'm still able to set all the files on both drives, so at least THAT is good. But I still can't get onto the internet, which makes this pc pretty useless for what we use it for.

Anyone got any other thoughts? BTW, thanks to everyone who replied. I do appreciate your help.

[bemildred]

19. That sounds like XP is unhappy, and the MBR is working.

MBR's don't know about "boot paths" as far as I know, and
I don't think the BIOS would say it could not "start".

You can try Mr. Fish's boot.ini shuffling idea or the
XP upgrade, I would think.

I would tend to the boot.ini idea first, did you take a look at
the content of the "boot.ini.backup" file?

Anybody else?

[bemildred]

20. Oh yes, this might help:

How To Edit boot.ini

[HamstersFromHell]

21. OK, if you can see all on both drives...

as you say above (with the 40 as master):

Boot the system up with both drives as you have described above.

Open Control Panel > Folder Options, then click the "View" Tab.

Check "Show Hidden Files and Folders"

Uncheck "Hide file extensions for known file types".

Uncheck "Hide protected operating system files"

Click Apply and Ok.

Now, I'm going to assume your old (40 gig) is drive F: and the new drive is still listed in XP as C:

Click Start, then Run, and type cmd.exe

I'm going to assume you know very little of basic DOS commands, so where I say type below, type in what follows, and where I say <enter> hit the enter key. If you know your way around DOS already, accept my apologies for "talking down". :)

This will probably get you to a F:\Documents and Settings\your_username> prompt.

type c:<enter>

You should now see a C:\> prompt. if it's C:\ followed by anything other than just the ">", type in cd \<enter>

Once you're at a C:\> prompt:

type attrib boot.ini<enter>

this should show something like:

A SH boot.ini

If it does, type in:

attrib -s -h boot.ini<enter>

type edit boot.ini<enter>

an editor should open showing the entire contents of the boot.ini file. It should read as follows:

(I'm going to substitute curly brackets "{" for square ones to work around DU's pseudo HTML. So replace the curly ones with square ones in the listing below for your boot.ini file, but I think you'll see that those are ok (square) in your existing file.)


{boot loader}
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
{operating systems}
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

I suspect your problem is the one of those lines above is incorrect. Most likely it's going to be the disk(0) or partition(1) parts.
There may be other lines in the boot.ini but ignore them...those lines above tell XP where to find it's files to boot. (Note that if XP was installed to a folder called WINNT instead of WINDOWS, the default= line in the boot.ini should show the folder name exactly, whichever it is. This shouldn't be a problem since you copied it folder for folder from your old drive...nothing changed.

Use the editor to make any changes so that your boot.ini file reads EXACTLY as it does above. This means you're booting from the first partition of the first drive in your system.

Once the file reads correctly, hit Alt, then f, then s to save it.
Again hit Alt, then f, then x to exit the editor. This should take you back to back at the C:\> prompt

type attrib +s +h boot.ini<enter>

then type exit<enter> to close the dos window.

shutdown the computer immediately and remove the 40 gig drive, rejumper the 160 for master and reinstall on the cable. See if it boots then.

If it doesn't, there one more thing to try short of reformatting and installing new. Some Maxtor drives came with a small bootable partition used to hold a copy of the setup software. If this partition wasn't erased, the boot.ini file could be pointing to it.

To try to work around that, repeat all the steps above, but change the partition(1) to read partition(2)

It sounds to me like when you booted the system up to copy the drive, Windows had already "moved" your 40 gig to F: and so the boot.ini was already "wrong" before it was copied to your new drive. That's why you're getting loader messages...the MBR and boot sector are fine now, just the boot.ini is pointing to a partition (or drive) that physically doesn't exist.

Let me know if this works!

[bemildred]

22. It did seem to me, if that does not work, that it might be useful

to take a look at the BIOS partition table, i.e. to
find FDISK or the equiv. and take a peek. I am a bit
curious as to what MaxBlaster did to it, but I expect
our friend would like to get it over with .

[jayfish]

24. That Makes Sense,...

especially if there was a Compaq recovery partition on the drive originally. Seems like MaxBlast should have copied that partition as well though. It's worth a try.

Jay

[denverbill]

25. OK, I finally had to throw in the towel.

I went ahead and made the changes you suggested to the boot.ini file, and retried it. I got a different message when I rebooted, something about a missing .dll file in the system32 folder.

I looked in the system32 folder, and there were only 2 files in the folder, as compared to dozens if not hundreds in the system32 folder on the 40gb drive. I hadn't anticipated that. I thought everything would be there if and when I finally got it to look in the right place. I could have copied the system32 folder over, but I had no way of knowing if the files were the correct ones anyway or if I'd end up with the same problems.

So, I gave up and used the restore CD's for my other Compaq and just wiped the new drive clean. The restore went eerily well. I figured at the very least it would gripe about needing a MS license or something, but everything loaded just dandy, it found the network, and I've already done every MS, Norton and Zonealarm update.

It would've been nice to get the drive duped and be able to log right on and have everything we needed right there, but after 3.5 days without that computer, and only getting a couple hours a night to try to figure it out, I just couldn't keep going on it. It's irritating because I can't clear off the 40gb drive, cause I'll never be able to confidently know that I've gotten everything I needed off of there. I know I can get most everything, but I'm always afraid I missed some important financial file, picture, email, or something that will be gone forever if I wipe the drive clean. Oh well. I've got 120 gig free on the new drive, so I guess another 40 gig on the old drive isn't that necessary.

Thanks to everyone who responded on this. You've gone beyond the call of duty in trying to get this fixed. I do really appreciate your efforts!

[HamstersFromHell]

26. Sorry it didn't work out for you.

At least changing the boot.ini got it pointed to the right drive.

Makes me wonder why the software didn't copy everything. Usually if it's unable to copy it'll at least present an error message.

I went through much the same as you did the other day.

Had upgraded motherboards (and chipsets) so I figured the old drive wouldn't boot properly (I was right), so I did a fresh install of Win2000 Pro on an old 20 gig I had laying around while I was waiting for FedEx to eliver my new SATA 120 gig drive..

When the new 120 gig drive arrived, I used the WD software included to partition it into 2 drives and to clone the 20 gig over to the boot partition. Then I had to hook up my old 80 gig drive to copy all the files over to the new drive, then another 20 gig drive where I had backed up some of my "portfolio" work from my previous job.

I could have run into much the same as you have time and again, as all 3 of the drives I copied to the new one were bootable Win2k installs. However, the saving grace is a setting on the new motherboard allowing you to select which drive you boot from. Just added each old drive, let the BIOS "read" it and hit delete to enter setup and made sure it was still set to boot from the new drive. Went flawlessly.

Hope everything goes smoother for you in the future!

[denverbill]

28. I can't complain too much.

At least I've got all my data, and by tonight, I'll have two copies of 95% of it.

I'm not sure about what happened either. Maybe it copied everything, but when I was trying to do the 'fix' with the Dell CD, something got wiped out along the way. When it was booting to the F drive, and the C drive wasn't installed, it was always trying to look for stuff on the C drive and i had to keep telling it to look on F to get it to boot. I have a feeling once I got it to boot to F, then reinstalled C, the the F drive still had some instructions on it somewhere to save stuff to C. I was hoping that drive still had a pristine copy of the data, but it's quite possible something got changed along the way with everything I was doing.

Thanks again for your help!

[bemildred]

27. A valiant effort. nt

[hobbit709]

23. Compaq

has a hidden 400 Mb partition on all its drives where it keeps bootup info, recovery and other data. If the BIOS doesnt find this partition during bootup, it freezes or worse. Just another one of those fine proprietary things Compaq does. On their support site there is info on how to replace with a new drive.