New Help Installing Hard Drive

A

Anthony1

New Member
Need Help Installing Hard Drive

Computer 1: Just died out on me.
Computer 2: Want to use the Master hard drive from the computer that just stopped working (computer 1) as the master hard drive for this computer. How can I do that? Will many steps need to be taken to get the drive to work (and to be compatible with the mother board) or is it something as easy as moving the jumper (?) from one space to another?

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, as I really need to get this thing working as soon as possible.

Thanks!
 
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What type of drive are we talking about here, IDE or SATA? If it's SATA, it's simply a matter of plugging it in (SATA and power of course) confirming it shows up in the bios, and viola.

If it's IDE/PATA, things are slightly more complicated, but nothing too bad... As you guessed, you need to move the jumper. If you're using a channel with another drive on it, you need to set the drive to whatever the current drive isn't set to. If it's a free channel, most drives will accept master or slave settings. HOWEVER, I know Western Digital drives are VERY picky. They have a "master with slave present" and "single drive" setting.

Most drives have diagrams printed on them. Examine this and try things out. There's little you could do to harm the drive with these jumper changes. Try one setting, if it doesn't work, shut it off, change the jumper, and try again.
 
Thanks for the reply and the help.

Just for reference: Computer 1: DEAD Computer 2: The working one I'm using now. (cause even I started to get a bit confused. lol)

And yea', I'm using IDE drives. Here's what I did just a moment ago (two different things):

1.) I set computer 1's HD jumper as "Master With Slave Present" and set the new computer 2's HD as "slave."

2.) When that didn't work, I just tried to use the old computers HD as the master - even removed the jumper to set it as "single." And here's what happens:

When I leave computer 2's HD on its own, everything works fine - hence me posting right now. But when I add the old computers HD as a slave or even as a single drive by itself to boot up as a master, here's what happens:

It said something along the lines of, "Attached to fasttrack controller. Bios not installed." Then it goes to a screen and says that "Windows did not shut down properly" (will explain below) and then it gives me an option to start using Safe Mode, Normal Mode, etc. When I choose "Safe Mode", some stuff starts to scroll from the screen, then it restarts and ends up at the same place again. When I choose to use "normal mode", it waits for a second, then very quickly flashes a blue screen, then reboots and winds up in the same place again.

I really hope I didn't crash my hard drive, 'cause there is too much information on there that I need. But here's what I did earlier today: The computer was off, but I unplugged the surge protector from the wall. When I came back home, the computer didn't work - really weird, as that's never happened before. Anyway, not sure that played a role in it not working, but figured I'd fill you in anyway. So in saying all of that, any idea what the problem may be?
 
Forgive the ignorance, but could it be that the old drive I'm trying to use on this computer isn't working because it also has an OS on it? It's not just a drive with files, it's what I had XP fully installed on. Does that matter?
 
You won't be able to boot using the dead computer's drive just because of how windows works. It's very rare windows will boot up on a different computer unless the other PC is nearly identical. So, setting it as the primary drive won't do anything unless you have it on the secondary channel or some other drive to boot from. I'd suggest setting the old drive as the slave. If you have a free channel, use that.

And just FYI, I'm pretty sure that "fasttrack" thing is for an onboard RAID controller. Just disregard it. You could probably disable it in the bios.
 
I actually get the same exact error running either way I run it: Master or Slave - and with the proper jumper settings. So I don' know...:(
 
What kind of hard drive is the primary one? Did you confirm it was set correctly too? It may be set to "Single drive"

An alternative method I use sometimes for quick recoveries (assuming you have two IDE channels) is connect the drive as the master to the secondary IDE channel. Since this is usually were CD-ROM's are located, I just remove them. This works great to just recover the data, but obviously if you're trying to install it permanently, you got a problem :P
 
Are you sure the hard drive from computer 1 is even good? This could cause your issues. The Other One is correct you just can't plug the drive in and use it.
You need to do one of 2 things:
1. Clone the old drive to the new drive.
2. Do a fresh install of Windows on the new drive (well old drive from PC1)
 
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