it works wait it don't.


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K putting a puter together 4 friend. Needed a hard drive so I went to a local shop and bought a used 1gig 4 20 bucks. Went home opened my case poped the bad boy in there started xp, formated the new drive.

Installed 98 on it. works fine, boots ect..........move on to the puter i am working on old board socket 7 pentium, 4 pci some ISA slots ect. Put drive in attach cables power up head to CMOS setup dectects as Primary Master, save cmos settings, restart, access disk ( i can hear it) and BOOM INVAILED BOOT DISK OR DISK ERROR!................

K drive is bad all good only 20 bucks, yet I through it back into my machine works like a charm, put it back in the old case hook cables up, double check jumper settings ect, same thing, Next tactic I took cables out of my machine hook up, same thing, put back in my case works boots, creat boot disk............

K now it's back in the old machine.......I have a boot disk.........I am thinking boot from the floppy and then browse around on the HD so I set up bios to boot from floppy.........same thing.

ANY ideas

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I'd sure like an answer to this too. That's what happened to my old PC that my bro gave to me. I'd like to get it back up and running, but no go. It used to work. I'm thinking it needs a new HD. My friend is soon going to give me his old HD since he has no use for it, and I'm hoping that'll do the trick. He has a nice 10 gig which will do just nicely. I wish I could help you though.

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I know it's not the HD cuz the HD works in my main system just fine. I had xp run a check on it and there's not even a bad sector on the disk, yet when I put it in the older pc it fails..............the only thing I can think of is the IDE controler on the board is bunk....which means I would have to get a hold of a IDE controler card or another board. A shop around my place sells old socket 7 boards for 10 bucks a shot, but they keep them in one of those big bins stacked on top of each other and people touch as please so that scares me.

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i can get it open.... manually with a screwdriver. but i do get the same error as you. the damn thing needs a bigger HD than 1 gig though. It's old, and no doubt it's corrupted.

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kxgard3, you installed win98 on it while on the xp pc?

the hd is missing the boot info. have you got the win98 bootdisk?

well install the hd back to the old pc and boot using the bootdisk. see if you can see the c: drive. if you can then run the following command: format /mbr

if i remember correcty, that should do the trick.

edit: i don't recall whether win98 bootdisk has the format program

you may need to navigate your way to c:windowscommand before you can run the command.

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I installed 98 on to the disk with my machine since it's faster and I did make a boot disk (format a: /s) and it doesn't even reconize that. I can't find my old win 98 boot disk that came with it. But by creating one that should work.

Yeah the 98 boot disk does have the format command.........so your saying that i should reformat the master boot recored whilest the HD is in the old PC?

/edit i installed 98 from machine for two reason's 1 it's faster and two I have a extra cd rom drive but when i install that the machine act's like it's not getting enough power...........even though it used to be the same cd rom drive that the machine had in it before.

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yes, you should format the master boot record while the hd is in the old pc, or if it's too much of a hassle, do it in your xp machine, but let it be the primary hd.

in either case, the mbr should be formatted via the command so that the hd now knows that it should be booting.

in regards to the other comments, are you saying that the floppy is not detected? does the light on the drive blink upon power on?

and just to make sure, maybe the bios is incorrectly setup. i doubt that, but it is possible.

and how old did you say the pc is? i'm thinking, if it can be a bios problem, it might be the lithium battery that needs replacing. hmm.

edit: i'm a bit confused about your last edit. are you saying the xp machine is not getting enough power w/ the other hd installed?

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No the machine that's not getting the power is the older one. It's a old pentium. The cmos battery is fairly new(some on bought it, it's one of those replacemt's that attach to the 3 pin connectors), and I have checked to make sure it is working correctly.....

This machine was working........then the friend took it and tryed installing the modem into it. When they brought it back cuz the could not get windows 95 to detect the modem...........I determined that, the modem was 2 new and thus needed the drivers installed for it via the cdrom disk...........so I threw in the old cd rom drive and then I got the "INVAILED BOOT DISK OR DISK ERROR" I check that bios was configered correctly and it was. The original HD was only 200meg so I figured it would be best to get a *cough* slightly newer one..............

One thing that i have noticed is the cables..............the floppy and IDE cables are different then I have ever seen before......

this is hard to explain..........but ever notice that your IDE cables have pin hole pin hole pin hole no pin hole pin hole pin hole on the top/bottom (one row has more then the other) these dont' but they were working before.

I will play around some more to night and see what I get.

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This machine was working........then the friend took it and tryed installing the modem into it. When they brought it back cuz the could not get windows 95 to detect the modem...........I determined that, the modem was 2 new and thus needed the drivers installed for it via the cdrom disk...........so I threw in the old cd rom drive and then I got the "INVAILED BOOT DISK OR DISK ERROR" I check that bios was configered correctly and it was. The original HD was only 200meg so I figured it would be best to get a *cough* slightly newer one..............

so, there was no CD drive, though what you put back was previously there. windows95 not detecting the modem might be, as you said needing new drivers, but then again i find win95's pnp not as good as win98se (of course improved by XP). what sort of modem is it. most modem drivers are not so large and can fit in a floppy, no need for CD. did the modem come with disks? unless the modem is less than a 14.k, it should have come with win95 drivers. the detection issue might be a conflict in settings. perhaps not enough resources were available for windows to detect it. actually i'm having the same problem with my soundcard in xp. i'm using onboard sound (not too shabby though).

One thing that i have noticed is the cables..............the floppy and IDE cables are different then I have ever seen before......

this is hard to explain..........but ever notice that your IDE cables have pin hole pin hole pin hole no pin hole pin hole pin hole on the top/bottom (one row has more then the other) these dont' but they were working before.

do you mean, both rows have the same amount of pinholes? that's normal, i work with old machines and they predominantly have that. sometimes even without that tab guide either, so i've got to be careful with installing ide cables. :D

about not getting enough power, were any other cards installed? power problems can cause a lot of weird things to happen. like not detecting a modem too. it's not out of reach. if you've got a spare power box, you might try to swap it out to see if that resolves the modem problem.

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