Maxtor hdd problems

jalfordvidman · #1 12-12-2004, 09:16 PM

Ok, I'm running an Athlon 2500+ with Windows XP Home and a Maxtor 40GB hdd as the primary hard drive. I'm trying to transfer an older hard drive (another 40GB) to my newer system. When I plug it in and configure it as a slave, the BIOS recognizes the new drive, but it won't boot to XP. The screen just goes black and doesn't do anything. The older drive has Windows98 on it, but that shouldn't matter because it's a slave, right? Help is appreciated.

s7p9a2m4 · #2 12-13-2004, 12:26 AM

Very strange. All I can say is double check master/slave jumpers. Having 98 on there should'nt be a problem. It would be a problem if your bios was trying to boot that drive first.

jalfordvidman · #3 12-13-2004, 06:16 PM

Well, I tried unhooking both of my CD-ROM drives and used that IDE cable to make the second hard drive the secondary primary drive, and it works. XP will boot up and I can log in and see the drive in My Computer. The only problem is, is that I can't access the drive itself. It first said that the drive needed to be formatted, which is dumb because there's data that I need to access on the drive. Now all it says is that the drive is inaccessable.

I've also tried to update the driver, but Windows says that I have the most updated driver for the device. Grrrrr....

s7p9a2m4 · #4 12-13-2004, 07:52 PM

Try taking ownership of the files on that drive.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...308421&sd=tech

Play_The_0dds · #5 12-13-2004, 08:50 PM

s7p9a2m4, i dont think they have the master /slave setup worked out. assuming: he/she is using the right cable, and have the jumper set correctly on both drives, may have the drives on the wrong cable connector.
a ide cable usually has two connectors. the middle connector is the slave, the end connector is for the master. some motherboards are really particular.
another thing is making sure the jumpers are set correctly, some drives have several options...make sure you use the correct ones.

he also said the drive is 40 gig (WITH WINDOWS 98), if they did not limit the capacity, or partition the drive so the primary partition is 32 gig or less some motherboards and software setups will have issues with it. fat partitions, though you can create larger and windows will install on them should NEVER be more then 32 gig.

s7p9a2m4 · #6 12-13-2004, 09:06 PM

Thanks for clearing that up PTO. I know using cable select settings on drives can also cause problems. Its best to use master/slave, then you know its going to work.
There is a lot of posting with people unable to read data from other drives after fresh installs and such. Unless they were private files setup by Xp, there should not be a problem reading the files. Is this correct? Fat 32 files created by ME and 98 should not have any ownership issues. Is this correct? Thanks.

Play_The_0dds · #7 12-13-2004, 09:18 PM

i slave dos, windows 3.1,NT,95,98,ME,2K,and XP drives to a machine i have with XP and read the drives, to scan for viruses, fix boot problems, or backup the files and never have a problem unless the drive is bad. i dont usually jump a post when other people are helping, but they are saying the jumper/cable setup is correct, i dont think it is.....either the jumpers are not correct, the cable is bad, or using the wrong cable, fat partition table is larger then 32 gigs, or maybe the drive is going bad.
edit: i clicked submit for some unknown reason.
being they can see the drive in windows "My computer" it means windows sees the drive and knows it has a partition...it is having a problem with seeing the file system.......if they had to play with the jumpers a few times to boot it, or i keep going back to "if the drive/partition 98 is on is larger then 32 gig" the may have done in the partition. they could run check disk and see if it fixes the errors, some third party software like partition magic have the undelete option that helps sometimes....

s7p9a2m4 · #8 12-13-2004, 10:59 PM

Do'nt worry about jumping into threads. That's what we're here for - to help.

jalfordvidman · #9 12-14-2004, 04:10 PM

Alright, I know the jumpers are set correctly, I don't know if I mentioned it in my last post, but my primary master was set to cable select. I changed this to master, but it still didn't work. I also made sure that both drives were slaved correctly, the slave in the middle of the cable and the master at the end. Didn't work.

I talked to my school's system admin, and he said that it might be possible to access the data by booting directly from the 98 hard drive. By first unplugging my main hard drive and then making the 98 drive the primary master, this, in theory, should work. But, he also said that there might be file allocation table problems. Apparently there's a way to change FAT 32 into NTFFS on XP, but I don't know if it'll corrupt the data on my drive.

jalfordvidman · #10 12-14-2004, 05:42 PM

Hmmmmm.......apparently, when I try to convert the FAt 32 file allocation tables to NTFS, windows doesn't wanna do that either. I used the correct command prompt, and it says that "CONVERT is not available for RAW drives". Any suggestions?