asked on

Help Installing New Hard Drive

This is a pretty difficult problem in my opinion. I know a fair amount about computers and the way they work and have been working a few days trying to get this to work.
I was having some problems with my hard drive so i got a new one and installed it and then installed windows XP on it. Then i wanted to transfer files from my old hard drive. So i hooked up the old hard drive too and thats when the problems began. Now the computer won't boot at all with out the old hard drive hooked up. So i tried reinstalling Windows XP on the new HD and it errored in the middle and i can't get it going again. It gives me crap about swap files or something like that. I think the problem is in my jumper settings and cable configurations. Please help, i'm running on my old HD now but i'm desperately looking for ideas so i can try it out. Thank you, any thing will be of assistance. -Mitch

paneless

You should be able to have both drives functioning at the same time. Check the drive manufacturers' website(s) to determine the appropriate jumper settings for both drives and set the new one to "master" and the old one to "slave". I suspect they're both configured as master (or at least not correctly) and that's confusing your BIOS at bootup. Once you get the master/slave situation corrected, XP should install on the new drive which will allow you to copy over the data you want to keep to it.

I did just what you are doing about 2 months ago, and it is working great. I'm running XP on the new drive, and triple booting it, and Win98 and Debian Woody on the old drive with a main and backup data partition on the new and old drives.

Hope this helps...

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

paneless

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

ticktacksir

Just to add to panelesses comment which is the right way to do it, but to make it more "paneless" sorry...Do like you did and install on your new hard drive with the old one NOT plugged. When done and you want to transfer your files, unplug the CDROMs and plug the old hard drive into the secondary channel. This way you don't have to worry much about master/slave conflicting. Start up the computer and make sure that it detects both drives. When you transfer the files, remember that you can transfer the data, but you can't copy your office install for example over, you have to use your cds....most people i do this for seem to have trouble wrapping there minds around this concept.