New hard drive.

[buzz456]

Here we go. All my hard drives are Western Digital. I was running out of memory on my 120g hard drive. I have a drive called x that was a slave. I cloned my c: drive with a 250g HDD. Swapped them out leaving my x drive out of the computer since I used that plug on the cable to do the clone. The new c: drive worked just fine. I then put the x: drive back in and then I can't see the new c: drive. The BIOS page says the is nothing in the 0 drive and then it says no operating system found. Previously both drives (original) were set to cable select. These are IDE hard drives by the way. I have the c: drive on the end of the cable. I swapped the cable out. No joy. As soon as I disconnect the x: drive the c: drive appears and works.
I have tried both with the darn things set to master and slave and cable select with no results.

Any ideas anyone?
Buzz

[DonR]

Maybe double check the bios settings?

My first thought was the master/slave jumpers on the drives, but looks like you already tried that..

Don.

[Hawk]

Maybe this link will help some.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/c ... ing-c.html

[buzz456]

Thanks Hawk. While I'm getting annoyed by the talking heads Sunday morning I'll give a couple of these a shot.

[Hawk]

Thanks Hawk. While I'm getting annoyed by the talking heads Sunday morning I'll give a couple of these a shot.

You don't have to wait until Sunday morning to get annoyed by the talking heads. You can turn on any cable news channel any time and get annoyed.

[buzz456]

You don't have to wait until Sunday morning to get annoyed by the talking heads. You can turn on any cable news channel any time and get annoyed.

I made a New Years resolution to watch much less of the blather and limit myself to only getting annoyed occasionally. Railworks is a lot more fulfilling.

[Hawk]

I hear ya' buzz.

[Chacal]

I had an epiphany in 2003, suddenly realizing there was nothing on my 200+ TV channels worth watching.
I turned the TV off and never turned it on again. Went into online gaming, met other players on Teamspeak, became an admin on several game servers and forums, learned to make maps and 3D stuff. Bonus: I missed the entire reality TV craze.

[buzz456]

Now that I have contributed towards a total hijacking of this thread I will tell you that I watched the golf instead of the talking heads this morning. I am a better person for it. I still can't get this new drive to play nice with my old storage disk. Just for the heck of it I put the original c: drive back in and it still play nice with my old slave drive. so....................while I had it in there I copied my backups I wanted to a external drive. Harmony has been restored in the Force.

I would still like to figure out what the heck is going on. I am going to save up my pennies and get another new HD to see if it will work OK as a slave.

[GaryG]

Hi

The cloned drive problem. Not 100% certain but I think an exact clone contains boot block info that identifies the drive(s) as they are configured when the clone is done. Due to this info, the original drive must be in the computer in order to boot.

I think a fix is to remove the original then run a boot block repair which fixes this little glitch. A Windows installation 'repair' might work. To be safest, disconnect all hard drives except the one you are trying to fix and the CD/DVD. Some Googling should describe this problem/fix, probably looking for "windows clone not booting" or something similar should assist.

GaryG

[buzz456]

I'm on it. Thanks Gary.
Buzz

[arizonachris]

Buzz, from a command prompt, run "fixmbr" If there is something in the boot sector that is tying that drive to another drive, that should fix it.

I'm still puzzled as to why the new drive doesn't want to play with the existing drive. There is no reason I can see. If you are on manual jumper mode instead of cable select, double check your jumpers. Many times I read the stupid thing upside down and spent hours chasing my tail. Oh, and I never use cable select. That's just a "me" thing.

[GaryG]

Each drive has what is supposed to be a unique identifier but when making an exact clone, we create two drives with the same identifier which messes Windoze up. This identifier isn't the drive letter or drive name that we can see or change. I'm guessing the identifier is one of those wonderful "12345678-9ABC-DEFG-HIJK-LMNOPQRSTUVW" thingies that are fully understandable. ;-).

This is what I understand is the cause of the cloned drive problem. Some cloning programs have an option to change the identifier to get around this problem.

GaryG