Problem with HDD or system??

[srinathtk]

Dear Friends,

I had the following config at My home PC: Celeron 433 with Intel 810e mother board, 10 GB+17GB hdd, 160MB RaM with win 98.
Earlier I had installed Win XP on 17GB HDD but it was not working alright for a long period. I Installed XP several times but found that it gets corrupted or so. Fianlly I went back to Win98. I loaded Win98 on 10GB hdd and kep 17GB hdd as primary slave.

Recently 17GB HDD developed serious problem and I purchased a 40GB HDD. AS I had all the facilities at my office, I gave 40GB hdd to my hardware engineer and told him to install WinXP. He connected this 40GB hdd to one spare system, installed WinXP. Checked found every thing was fine.

I took the 40GB hdd home which is installed with WinXP and conneted it as Primary master. When booted, it gave some errors.It went to the list of 'Safe mode, Safe mode with command prompt, Start Norm,ally etc'. But when I select start normally also it just went hung or stopped working.

I thought WinxP has some problem.Tried to re install. Here also first it shows that it copies all the files and then message 'Setup will now restart your system' and stoppes at that stage.

I removed the 40GB HDD and brought it to the office, connected to the same machine where WinXP was installed. I was shocked to see that WinXP booted normally and was working normally.

I am now unable to find the problem. Whether the problem is with my home computer it self? How can I solve my problem.

Please help me.

Regards

Srinath

[glc]

Your home PC may have a 32gb bios limitation. You will need a bios update (if available) or an addon IDE controller card.

If it's a Western Digital drive, you cannot jumper it to Master if there is no slave drive present, you must remove the jumper or use Cable Select with an 80 wire cable.

[Vigo]

I would think that if bios was reading the hdd correctly he wouldnt be getting to a windows safe mode screen. Still, cable select settings on a WD are jumpers 1-2. Might need to include Jumper 5-6 as well if its an older drive.

Removing all the jumpers works with WD's if its the only drive.

Out of curiosity, who makes the drive and what ATA interface is it? That board is ata 66 and even though drives are backwards compatible sometimes they create problems when the interface doesnt match.