New hard drive.

Hi!

I have a Gateway Performance 1400 I'm trying to fix up. Everything on it is standard, save for the 256 MB of RAM I added a few years ago. I added another 512, and the memory now seems to be working fine. However, I also wanted to add another hard drive. I bought a 160 GB Western Digital Caviar SE.

I think having the same basic problem as in this old thread. I updated the BIOS and it was working with just the first 20 GB Maxtor D4540X-4K hard drive in there. However, when I put the second hard drive in, it won't start. It tells me there's an invalid boot disk in A:, even if I disable A: from the boot sequence or it tells me there's no operating system if I can get past the first message. When I hit tab as it's starting, it'll tell me there's a 137.4 GB hard drive installed as the slave, but that's as far as I can get because it won't load 2k Pro.

I'm 99% sure I have the cable settings and the jumper settings right for both drives. I printed out the information straight from Seagate's website and Western Digital's website and set them up like they're supposed to be, but it still won't work. >:/

Please help! Thanks. :]

 

So you have the boot drive on the end of the ribbon with the new drive on the second connector correct?
Is the new drive jumpered slave or cable select?

 

Mmm. Yeah, I have it set up like you said. It doesn't matter, either way it won't work. When I have it on cable select, it will tell me it cannot find an operating system. When I have it on Master/Slave, it won't start-up, period. It just gives me a message saying the boot diskette in A: is invalid and I can't get it to go beyond that.

I suppose it would work fine if I took the second hard drive out, but that would defeat the purpose of adding another hard drive, haha. Um... should I just return this one and get an 80 GB one? I don't think I'd have the same difficulty getting the system to read it, since there wouldn't be such compatibility issues.

 

Have you checked the jumper on the original drive? Some have a different setting if they have a slave attached.

Can you try the drive on the other cable, maybe disconnecting an optical drive, if necessary?

 

Yeah. I printed out the instructions from Seagate's website for the jumper settings on the original drive, and I'm sure I had them right. argh.

Update, anyway... now the thing won't start at all. It will not detect the operating system on the first drive, even with the second one taken out completely. >_o

I'll go do what you said. I'm going to take out the Zip drive and the CD drive and just try to get it to start with only the hard drive. Be back in 15. XD

 

Agh. I popped in my 2k CD and went into the recovery console and used CHKDSK, and it's telling me there's an unrecoverable error with the drive. What did I do? ;;

 

That doesn't sound good. Chkdsk /r?

 

Same message with a little more information. :/

I did uh... FIXBOOT on it. Instead of telling me there's no OS, it's telling me NTDLR is corrupt... so I'mma try and fix that doing some of the stuff on this page: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm

If not, I guess I'll just copy everything over and save it, then just reinstall 2k. I was thinking about telling the computer's owner to do that anyway, because I haven't reformatted it/done much with it since... hm. 2002-2003, maybe. It's so full of crap. x_o;

 

If the error in with the drive itself, the NTLDR repair won't make much difference. There is always the possibility that it is not the drive. It could be memory. Be sure you didn't loosen anything while in the case and check all connections and cards.

If NTLDR really is missing or corrupt, you should be able to boot with one of these:

Bootable XP Sysboot Floppy
XP Sysboot CD Image

Though for XP, they should work for NT4--->XP.

 

That's simple replace the hard drive.

 

Mmm, ok, situation's changed.

I finally have the damn thing reading both hard drives. To do that, I had to format and reinstall Windows 2000 on the 160 GB hard drive. That works. But, when it reads the hard drives, it reads the 160 GB drive as a 127 GB, still, and the 20 GB? It reads that as a 10 GB... and there's *nothing* on the 20 GB hard drive, except a bunch of fragmented files.

I suppose that means whatever was on that is now lost, yeah? And how do I fix it so it reads the drives properly? :/

 

You need to go to SP4 on Windows 2000 to get drive support for over 132 Gb and for the other one I haven't a clue though certainly both drives are really "toast" so I am not sure why you are playing with them, If you right click "My Computer" and choose "Manage" and then Disk Management, how does the smaller drive read there? If there is unallocated space there as I bet there is you can either partition and format it or use possibly merge it back into the main partition but not having used Windows 2000 in years I am not sure if the partitioning tool there can do that, though a third party program like Partition magic certainly could.

 

In disk management, it reads the hard drive as 19.0 GB healthy. There's no unpartitioned space or anything. However, in my computer, it only shows the 10 GB. oO;

 

Have you gone into Folder Options, View in Control Panel and unchecked the 3 options for hidden files and folders? This makes no sense at all unless there is a hidden partition on that drive.

 

Hm. Makes no difference. I still just see the blank 10 GB in My Computer, and 19 GB in disk management.