Boot up problem

[angel123]

Hello, I would like some help on this.
A while back, I installed a maxtor 40gig harddrive which I set as a slave to my 9.5gig drive(sorry don't know what make it is). I partitioned the maxtor into 2x20gig partitions, and yesterday I used the maxblast3 disk to try and copy all the files from the master drive to the new drive partition "d". This morning I changed the jumper to master and disconnected the older drive. When I tried to start the computer up, I got a boot failure message, and was prompted to insert a floppy boot up disk, which I haven't got. I also don't have the o/s disks as I got the computer with the o's already installed (Windows XP home service pack 1). What can I do to get the computer to start up with the maxtor as master?
I intend to not use the old drive as my PSU is not good enough to let me use eveything I have on my computer ( CD-Rewriter, DVD-rom and the two HD and floppy disk drive- it is a 235w psu)

[doctorgonzo]

Did you just copy the files to the larger drive? The larger drive needs the boot partition copied over too, otherwise it can't boot.

What is the brand of the computer?

[angel123]

Yes I think I did, but I'm not really experienced with computers. The computer inself is a custom built Lasertek, with a AMD Althon 750Mb processor, 256Mb RAM on a Jetway motherboard.

[angel123]

Sorry I don't know what the boot partition is.

[Gizmo]

I think what doctorgonzo means is the bootsector on the hard disk. This is written to the drive while installing the OS.

[angel123]

Which area on the hard disk would that be?
I was under the impression that when I copied the files from one drive to the other, then it would have been all copied- which it seems to have been.
How will I be able to find out if it was copied over to the new drive? And how would I be able to boot up from the new drive once I had it set to master again?
Sorry for the questions.

[Cricket]

Since this is an older computer, did you go into BIOS and try to redetect the hard drives? The system might still be trying to find the 9.5GB HDD. On the BIOS Features Set Up screen, change the first IDE device to NONE. Then go to the AUTO Detect HDD screen and try to detect the 40GB HDD.

:) Cricket

[angel123]

Right, I will try that out tomorrow (it's 21.49 here in England). So if I swop the drives over -maxtor to master, 9.5 gig to slave, will it be able to boot up from the 9.5 gig slave?

[angel123]

I will also add that when I started up the computer after setting the maxtor to master, bios did detect it. It didn't detect the 9.5 gig as I hadn't connected the power cable as I thought it wouldn't be needed (how wrong was I? lol) well you know what they say - learn from your mistakes. (As long as my mistakes don't kill my computer in the meantime) but you have to learn somewhere.

[angel123]

Can you use a slave drive as a boot drive? Or does it have to be the master drive? If so, all I would need to do is swop the jumpers around and set the maxtor to master and the other to slave.

[glc]

You should use the master as the boot drive. Before you switch jumpers, you have to determine what type IDE cable you have - if it's a new type 80 wire, the position of the drive on the cable determines whether it's master or slave, you can't override that with jumpers and have things work. The blue end goes to the motherboard, the black end is master, and the gray in the middle is slave - and the drives should be jumpered to Cable Select. With standard 40 wire, jumper to your heart's content.

When you are connecting and disconnecting drives - if you disconnect the power cable but leave the ribbon cable on, this will cause bootup problems. Any drive that has the ribbon cable connected must have power.