Hard drive help please

[Bjm2587]

Hey, I have tried everything and I can't find an answer can somebody please help me? Here's whats going on, I have a pc with a sata drive and I wanted to boot off my old hard drive with xp on it. The mother board only supports one IDE slot so I unplugged the ide cord from my cd drives and plugged it into the old ide hard drive. It wouldn't boot and came up with a blue screen and about a paragraph of white letters but it flashes so quick all i can read is boot error shutting down pc to prevent problems.... If anyone can help me figure out how to boot off my old ide hard drive with xp please let me know. Second and MORE IMPORTANT is that now the original sata drive isnt booting. I plugged everything back in the way it was before unplugged the old ide drive and nothing.... Basically it says no bootable device found and then the intel boot manager says media test failure check cables and I have made everything was properly set up :bang head please help! Thanks to all who reply.

[realtadiquantu]

IDE devices* have a jumper on the rear next to the data and power cables.

Listed on the drive should be an image or instructions on which pair of pins you should run for each mode. If you will be using just the one IDE drive, set it to master. And so on.

Once you verify that, plug the cables back in and look in your BIOS to see if it sees the IDE HD. Now, check your boot order and ensure that the IDE HD is before the SATA drive (assuming it has an OS< but still good practice)

Try booting :).

[curtis1552]

Before you rebooted with the new HDD, did you modify the BIOS settings to allow it to recognise the IDE drive? (and could it now be looking for that instead of the SATA drive?)

[Bjm2587]

Hey, realtadiquantu, I did all of that prior to posting my question. And curtis you bring up a good point. I did check the bios and everything seems to be set up right. I don't know what else to do so I posted this question, does anyone else have any ideas?

[curtis1552]

XP can be particular about the partitions it is installed on, it could be a problem with the MBR on the IDE drive.
You could reinstall the HDD and try to use the recovery/reinstall option on the XP disk, which should work on fixing the MBR (if that is what did it).
I'm currently downloading several LiveCDs that are designed for system rescue. Once I've given them a run I'll tell you if they can help.
I'm getting SystemRescueCD, UltimateBootCD, and Hiren's Boot CD.
The SRCD has MHDD, which is a low level harddrive diagnostic.