Today I decided to take some files off of the hard drive on the computer I’m using right now (henceforth called the ‘P333’) and move them onto the ‘upstairs computer’ (P100). (This all stems from my last thread, btw ).
Anyway, I took the P333 upstairs and yanked out the hard drive and installed it in the P100. Here’s where the problem begins.
The P100 would not boot up. Well, not fully at least. It will only count up the memory and give me the two beep a-okay. It doesn’t get to the BIOS screen at all though.
It appears to at least access the hard drive and the floppy (I can’t tell if it gets the CD-ROM or not), so I’m assuming it’s not any of the drives or cables. But just to be sure I tested all of the cables and power supplies too. I also tried to boot it with just a bare hard drive with no other drives
So I’m guessing something has gone wrong with the BIOS.
Does anyone have any other guesses as to what it might be or any other tests/fixes I can do? More importantly, why would my system go nuts like this upon a routine installation?
I think later bioses allowed you greater options for your boot drive. You can boot from a CD-ROM, for example. Did you install the new hard disk as your C drive? Is there another hard disk in the computer? You might need to set up the new drive as a slave and let the existing hard disk be the master. Did you have device drivers for the hard disk? They might need to be reconfigured for the bios in the p100. I’d create a bootable floppy and boot from it, then use fdisk to see if your system even sees the new hard disk. I doubt that it’s a speed issue. Almost certainly it’s a bios issue, and probably one you won’t be able to work around. When you create your bootable floppy, be sure to put the configuration files on it along with edit and fdisk. You might be able to get a newer bios for the old machine, but what are the odds? Not good.
If the new drive is much larger than the HDs out when then computers was new, its very posssible that The old Bios won’t be able to decipher the Boot sector on the large drive. Check the P100’s website to see if there are any BIOS updates that will recogize larger HDs.
NVRAM is a little thing in some Bioses that remembers what HD you have in your computer. It stays the same after the first time you get everything right…UNLESS you change the BIOS so that it clears NVRAM. So, still thinks you got your old HD in there probably.
Easy to do in person but trying to do these things remotely is insane.
Per wolfman if your M/S jumpers are set correctly and you still have the problem this is likely an older BIOS confused by a new big multi gig drive problem. Don’t screw around with the big drive on the old system too much or you can screw up the partition table on the drive if the old controller tries to access it in non-LBA mode or overwrites boot sector info.
Things to try:
[ul][li]Go to the web sites for your drive manufacturers and look up the jumper settings if possible. Some drives have this printed on the disk, but many disk makers have great web resources for this type of thing.[/li][li]Make sure you have master & slave set up properly. If you put the new disk on a different controller, it can be the master/standalone if you don’t have anything else on it.[/li][li]Go into the bios and turn on LBA.[/li][li]Heed the warnings of others. It may be easier to put the old disk in the new computer, it is more likely to be backward compatible. You’ll still need to worry about master/slave.[/li][li]Put a LAN in your home. :)[/li][/ul]
Going on k2dave’s conjecture that the drive jumpers were set incorrectly, I checked 'em all. The reason I didn’t bother to check my c: drive in the first place was that there was no problem when it was lone-boning it on the primary IDE. But assuming it was set as master was foolish.
I came to find out my C: drive is set to CS (something I would have never even considered!). Hooking up another drive set as slave somehow confused my computer to the point of no return. Once I set the c: to master the computer worked fine again.
).