We recently acquired an old Dell Optiplex and want to transfer the harddrive from a previous computer to the Dell. Problem is the Dell will only recognize the HD it came with. Can anyone help?
What operating system is it running? How many E(IDE) cables are there, and can you double them up? Does Bios recognize both of them?
this may all sound obvious - I don’t know what your level of competence is (or if mine is adequate)
make sure an OS is installed on the new drive.
temporarily - disconnect your cd rom from it’s ide cable and plug that (the cable) into the old hd. make sure the old hd’s jumper switch is set to master.
turn on the computer. if the comp does not autodetect ide drives at boot - press ‘del’ (or whatever) when asked - to enter setup. find the option to auto-detect drives.
when your computer has loaded up you should be able to simply copy the data from the old drive using windows explorer. make sure you don’t overwrite things such as windows. (avoid the ‘c:\windows’ and ‘c:\program files’ directores if need be)
when done plug your cdrom back in.
I am assuming that you have a WIN PC. You will not be able to just install the other drive and expect it to work as the boot drive because the components are different. You should be able to make it a D: drive by attaching it as a secondary drive on the IDE cable. The jumpers on the drive will need to be set to slave. What Operating Sytems are on these machines?
Toddly: won’t it work as a primary if it is on it’s own ide channel (the cd’s channel)? and won’t windows see it in that situation? if not I am surprised.
Stccrd:, Win98 (dunno if it’s SE or not) for the Dell and Win98SE for the other. Two IDE cables with two connectors on each. Second IDE has a CD-ROM and Zip drive attached. BIOS recognizes the CD-ROM, Zip, and the 6gig HD it came with. Refuses to recognize any other HD.
Lobsang: that’s one thing we haven’t tried yet. I’ll tell Angie to plug the second HD in place of the CD and see what happens.
Toddly, that’s the problem; both HDs are currently on the same IDE and the PC refuses to recognize the slave. We’ve tried the jumpers in different positions for both drives.
If we can’t at least get the Dell to recognize a second HD we’ll return it and just upgrade the old system. The old system has a problem with a motherboard, it boots when it wants to and when it does it won’t accept a mouse. Not a PS2 mouse, not serial, not USB, no mouse will work with it anymore.
There are a few possibilities
1: It’s a fairly rare occurance but some brands of IDE drives will simply not play nice with each other on older machines. There is no fix for this other than a separate IDE controller. ($20-$50)
2: The BIOS on the Dell is limited to recognizing 8 gigs max and the drive you are trying to transfer is bigger than that and confusing it.
Per Lobsang try the hard drive on the second channel.
There is a likely solution if nothing else works, but it’s a bit tedious. Go to the drive manufacturer’s website for the C drive of the Optiplex and download it’s BIOS extender applet. This applet will create a floppy that will install a BIOS utility that loads before the main partition boot track and lets older BIOSes work with different/ larger drives that may otherwise confuse them. This BIOS utility should let the system “see” the second drive.
BAck up everything important before doing this JIC.
Also as a side note, on some BIOS setups there is a completely separate tab window or sub-menu in the BIOS setup for auto-recognizing hard drives that is separate from the section where they are listed and may not be immediatley obvious from the main screen
Aha! The old drive is at least a 20 gig so I guess we’re better off getting another motherboard.
Be very careful when upgrading the bios.
Almost every error or mistake done on a PC is recoverable except a botched/wrong bios upgrade. because with a duff bios a pc can’t even get to a point where you can fix the error.
it is like a broken down car 20 miles from a garage, that will only fix the car if it can get to the garage, which it can’t.
I lost a PC once due to upgrading the bios, luckily it was a great excuse to get a better PC.
If you are referring to my BIOS “upgrade” suggestion I am referring to is a software based applet that essentially is a very early loading TSR that (IIRC) installs and loads off a small hidden partition. You can’t really hurt the PC hardware with this applet. If worse comes to worse you can boot with a floppy or drive initalization disk and blow the BIOS applet off the disk if you want.
I am not sure why the 2nd drive is not recognized but it may have something to do with the Dell BIOS setup. There are usually 3 setups for IDE drives, Master - Slave - Cable Select. Are you certain that you have these settings correct? Have you seen diagrams that show how the jumpers are positioned for each type, sometimes they are listed on the drive.
You can connect it to the other IDE chanell but it still would not be the boot drive and should be drive D: I would try this first. You can get the data from there or copy the contents of the C drive to this one. Then you may be able to boot with this drive after removing the other. There may be limitations in the older Dells that limit it from recognizing drives over a certain size. I am not sure about that for this machine. There are methods to get around it though. Good Luck I will try to check back Saturday.
Fixed it! As Astro suggested, I downloaded a file from the Dell website. The file formatted a floppy so it would flash the BIOS; now that the BIOS is upgraded it recognizes the 20gig.
We pulled the 16Meg video card from the old system and put it in the Dell. The Dell thinks we’re trying to do a two-monitor setup with the monitor plugged into the onboard video even though it’s in the 16Meg card. I went into Control Panel/System to remove the onboard video driver and the screen went blank! Any ideas how to get the Dell to know the monitor is really in the card instead of the onboard video?
Well, we pulled the 16Meg card from the Dell and started using the onboard video instead. At least it works.
Is the video card AGP (short slot more centered towards the middle of the motherboard, usually brown), PCI (medium sized slot, normally an off white), or ISA (long slot, normally black)?
When you install a new Video card it should kill your onboard, does Windows pick it up as new hardware?
Have you tried a different slot?
Did you think it would be cool to rub your feet on the carpet for 15 minutes and touch the video card?
PCI, kills the onboard, but the PC thinks the PCI is the onboard! Never tried a different slot and I don’t think we will. It works fine with just the onboard video and no card.
And, no, we’re not about to discharge static electicity into a computer, even if it’s just a P2-400.
Thanks for trying to help.