How do you make a hard drive bootable?

Factual Questions
1

I’m staring at the following:

1). An eMachine with a dead primary hard drive, about a year and a half old, running XP.

2). The factory installation disk that came with the eMachine.

3). A brand new shiny hard drive fresh from Best Buy, still in the box.

What do I do now? I’ve asked half a dozen people and Googled until I was blue in the face, and all I’ve come up with is all sorts of internally contradictory or poorly presented information on how to proceed. Is it as simple as hooking up the hard drive, booting to the disk drive, and letting the BIOS and the installation disks take it from there? Is it really that simple? It seems that it must be a fairly straightforward procedure, but I can’t find any authoritative source that will lay it out in a concise, step-by-step manner.

2
  1. Replace hard drive (i.e. remove old drive and install new one).
  2. Put the install disk in the CD (or DVD) drive.
  3. Turn on the computer. If you’re lucky, the computer will boot from the install disk, and tell you how to proceed.
  4. If it doesn’t boot from the install disk and instead tries to boot from the hard drive (and fails, because there’s no operating system on the new hard drive), turn off the computer and turn it back on. Then watch for “Press F1 for setup” or some similar message. Press the specified key. Then go to the Boot option and select the CD/DVD drive as the first boot drive. Then reboot, and the computer should now boot from the install disk.
3

Has this been turned off at any point in the past year and a half? How did you turn it on? What do you do with a pc that has a dead hard drive?

Have you been booting from a secondary hard drive? From diskettes or a cd?

(Not trying to be snarky, I just don’t understand the picture.)

4

As I would understand it, the machine is a year and a half old, while the death of the hard drive is much more recent.

5

Right. The hard drive shuffled off its mortal coil yesterday. I just threw in the stuff about its age and OS because I thought it might be pertinent information. Sorry for the ambiguity.

6

Just yank the old drive, put in the new drive, and stick the disk in.

There’s a non-zero chance that your recovery/restore disk will recognize that the HD is new and refuse to work with it (especially since you’ve got an eMachines). In that case, you’ll have to get yourself a new copy of Windows.

7

No, if the restore disc doesn’t work (which is unlikely), all you need to do is find/borrow/whatever a Windows XP OEM CD and use the product key on the sticker on the case. The machine already has a valid XP license, so there’s no reason to buy another license.

8

Okay, thanks.

It’s ALMOST that simple. IIRC, there are one or two steps to designating the new hard drive as being the primary. One step is that if there are two connectors on the very wide gray 24-wire cable, then you need to connect the hard drive to the one at the far end, not the one in the middle. The manual for the hard drive and/or the PC will probably instruct you one this.

The possibly-other step is that the hard drive may need the jumpers to be set for “master”. Look at the instructions that came with the drive, and or the printed label. Newer drives are usually pre-set for “auto-select”, in which case you don’t need to worry about it.

Put the cd in the machine. Hopefully, it will boot up to a program which will install XP onto your new hard drive. The only thing you might need the BIOS for is for the boot sequence: When booting from the hard drive fails, it ought to try booting from the cd automatically, but if it doesn’t, you might need to change those settings.

9

God I hope not, but here’s a taste of the crap that I tried to wade through in an attempt to find my answer. Gotta love the first response in the thread. It seems that the poor bastard who started the thread had some issues, but was reassured by more knowledgeable people that this shouldn’t be the case. I hope they’re right. I can just buy a new processor for less than the cost of a copy of Windows.

10

Just piping in to say that I recently had a hard disk crash, put in a working second hand drive, reformated with recovery disk (all the right files are installed on the new disk), set the jumper and BIOS boot up and it still didnt boot up). Our work techie is looking at it tomorrow so will let you know what the problem was.

11

There is one thing that, in my experience, often gets overlooked and that is that the bootable partition on the primary hard drive must be marked as bootable in the partition table. This is just a flag set via software, but if it is not set, the BIOS will not turn over the boot process to the drive.

It’s possible this is the problem your drive has, scm1001.

12

For a machine of this age this will not be the case, it will be SATA hard drives which do not require rejumpering at all

13

Funny—my wife keeps telling me the same thing.