New Seagate harddrive…about 2 seconds from smashing it!

Got this hard drive form my parents, they ordered it form newegg not realizing they need serial ata so they gave it to me rather then pay the restocking fees….


Anyway, I have built at least a dozen systems and installed at least that many hard drives and never had this problem.


I want to make this drive my new boot drive and remove my old WD because of spance issues. new drive is 232g and my old is only 100. Anyway I use the $%^^& “disk wizard software” from seagate for windows. But the drive will not boot!

Yes I used the option to copy all of c onto the new drive but nada… Tried it 3 times now....


The seagate works perfectly as a slave, all files are the same as the c drive, but as soon as I plug it in as the primary it wont boot! It’s really starting to **** me off.

This is my 1st seagate drive and im pretty sure it will be my last…. Any suggestion other then reinstalling my entire system?

Make sure you've turned on all of the IDE controllers in the BIOS, and double-check your boot order to make sure it's looking for the drive. Those are the easy ones I can think of. It may also help to set the jumper on the IDE drive to master.

In my personal opinion anytime I get a new HD I just a fresh reformat of the system just saving the really important stuff.

I enjoy a clean system every now and than.

sounds like a copy problem not a hard drive problem, you try norton ghost?
I second BigTree, a fresh install is the best route speed wise, and you can save all your files on your 100gb slave...

As well did you have the drivers installed for SATA. It might of not installed it if it wasn't needed.

Try setting them both to 'cable select.' Some WD drives actually recommend this setting and maybe the Seagate needs to be that way as well to play nice with the WD.

Pull old drive from the system (or just check your boot order in BIOS)
if still nothing pull old drive
pop in the XP cd boot into recovery console, and type in fixmbr at the command prompt.

EDIT: If you copied your original drive onto the new drive then restarted, the "new" drive will not function correctly, as it will now be the D: drive but the windows install will be pointing to C:

If the above suggestion did not work, format new drive, run the copy program from old to new. Power down, remove old drive, make new drive master and power up

If still no boot, try the recovery console again.

If still no boot, download the true image trial from acronis works perfectly

Thx for the replies. I tried all jumper setting and no difference. The drive is an ultra ATA and all the different setting in the bios has no discernable effect.

I finally just gave up and re installed my old hard drive but! Oddly enough my system was still acting strangely. It was booting very slowly and my asus k8n start up screen was absent? Then it started not booting at all?!?

I finally moved the jumper and reset the bios. Now everything is back to square one and I’m done for the night…

I hate these weird problems.

I did have one more question since I’m taking the time to write this.

It is possible to run a serial ata hard drive and a also an ultra ata at the same time? For example could I have say a 10k RPM serial ata for my c drive and then have a another ultra ata on the primary IDE?

Thx in advanced…

lowlypawn said:

Thx for the replies. I tried all jumper setting and no difference. The drive is an ultra ATA and all the different setting in the bios has no discernable effect.

I finally just gave up and re installed my old hard drive but! Oddly enough my system was still acting strangely. It was booting very slowly and my asus k8n start up screen was absent? Then it started not booting at all?!?

I finally moved the jumper and reset the bios. Now everything is back to square one and I’m done for the night…

I hate these weird problems.

I did have one more question since I’m taking the time to write this.

It is possible to run a serial ata hard drive and a also an ultra ata at the same time? For example could I have say a 10k RPM serial ata for my c drive and then have a another ultra ata on the primary IDE?

Thx in advanced…

Click to expand...

Of course

im running 2 sata drives in raid for primary OS 1 sata drive for storage and 1 pata drive for giggles.

(nother PC is getting a pata OS drive and 2 320GB perps for storage