New Hard Drive Question

Hard drive question?

My CD drive is broke in one computer that had windows 98 on it, So i took the hard drive out and put it into another computer and installed windows XP onto it. Now that i put the hard drive back into the old computer when i start my computer it tells me that windows failed to start succesfully and it lets me pick how i wish to start, no matter how i start it brings me back to the same screen and nothing happens. Just wanted to know how i could fix this if its possible.

1.5 TB Hard Drive question?

Wow, that is a laptop with a bunch of horsepower! The 1.5 Tb HDD means that the total space on the drive is 1,500,000,000,000 bytes of storage. That usually includes a small partition of less 10 Gb or less (which usually *Does Not* have a drive letter and therefore cannot be directly addressed - usually the restore function is done by pressing a function key as the machine is booting up) . for restoring the computer if disaster strikes. Personally I have never found these partitions to be of use and if I have the install disks that came with the computer, I remove the recover partition. That is what I do and may not be advisable in your case.
One of the problems with the recovery partitions in general is that they never get updated when your regular Windows Updates happen so you are getting the machine back to where it was when the manufacturer first put Windows on the machine. That means that if you restored from the partition, you would have to reinstall the Operating System and then do all the Windows Updates that have occurred since the machine was new.

What I (once again, me) do, when getting a new machine is:

1. Get an external hard drive to back up the system
2. Do all the Updates to get Windows current
3. Put on whatever programs and remove the trash ones that come with some computers.
4. Use a backup program other than the one that comes with windows (if there is one error in the backup, it comes to a screeching halt!) to the external drive. I use a program called DriveImageXML which does a great job. For instance, it doesn't have to copy parts of your disk that are unused which means that the Backup is usually substantially smaller than the disk that Windows is on.

Well, sorry I got so carried away. I do that from time to time...

My computer will format, but then not "see" my new hard drive?

Well, I am going to take a long shot guess here, and I may not be right, but its worth investigating anyway. First of all, the installer CD that you got from Dell probably installs the SATA drivers for the original hard disk - it may be that the Dell Driver for SATA is good enough to see your new hard disk, but somehow, that driver is not working correctly with the installed windows operating system. How a driver can be good enough to detect the SATA and format it and then refuse to recognize it on boot is a little escoteric for me, as I am not a driver developer or writer, so I can't say - but this sounds like a SATA driver issue to me.

I would call Dell back, tell them exactly what you have said here, and ask them if they have any kind of "PROPRIETARY" driver settings for SATA that only allows windows to detect the kind of hard disk you had before. See what I mean?

It may very well be that the driver is proprietary, is only able to read the specific hard disk that was in the computer before, may work partially but not fully with a non-dell standard hard disk (despite what they said!). Ask them if they have a driver you could download that would work generically with ANY SATA drive. You will have to reload windows, go through the driver loading screen by holding F6 down as soon as the XP installer starts to load specific drivers. The drivers should be on a floppy disk because this is what XP is going to look for, but I have also had drivers on a CD and just swapped out the Windows Installer CD for the driver CD and that worked too. You have to put the Windows Installer CD back in the CD drive after you load the SATA drivers from the other CD to continue installing windows.

Why does Dell Dimension 3000 not recognize new hard drive?

I was attempting to upgrade the hard drive on my dad's computer, a Dell Dimension 3000 I got for him about 5 years ago. It came with an 80GB IDE and I replaced it with a 400GB Seagate IDE I bought brand new off of ebay. It said in the listing it was compatible with the 3000. I unplugged the old one, plugged in the new one, it was already set as master, it's the only hard drive in the PC, I set BIOS to boot from the XP Pro CD in the tray, it loads but when it gets to the part where it want's to load the OS, it says windows can not find any hard drives on the computer, why would this be? I set the jumper to every position on the hard drive and noting made a difference, it's plugged in good and solid, the connection isn't the problem, I plugged the old drive back in and the computer fired up as normal. Is there something stupid that I'm missing or could there be a problem with the hard drive itself? I know that some older computers don't recognize larger hard drives but the computer isn't really ALL that old and XP should recognize a 400GB, right? Any ideas?