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Can't boot from HD, going out of my skull

P

Polishwonder74

Senior member
This is probably a very simple problem which will make me look like a TOTAL n00b, but here goes:

I've got this WD200 20 gig HD that is giving me a monster headache.

I'll start from the beginning. I couldn't get any of my computers to recognize it properly and boot from it. I was getting "Primary Hard Disk Failure" messages from some BIOSes, and others would ignore it completely. I was able to get it recognized as a slave on one of my XP machines, I unleashed Partition Magic on it and was able to finally convert the Linux partitions to NTFS. (The guy I bought it from installed Linux on it to test it before he sold it). So now I have an extended NTFS partition on the drive, and cannot get it to boot. So now I should at least be able to have my computer recognize the drive so that I can get to installing XP on it, right?

What would cause my computer to give me a "primary disk failure" when I go to boot it up and install XP on it? So far I've been able to get through the first part of installing XP, but when the computer restarts and goes to the 2nd part of the install, I get that nasty HD failure message and can't finish up.

Right now I've got the hard drive set up as my slave and I see all the stuff on it that came from the XP installation. What in sam hell is happening to me?

. . .please help, I'm losing my %$#@ mind.
 
Can't boot from an extended partition. An extended partition has an MBR that points to a boot sector. That boot sector is in fact NOT a boot sector but another MBR which points to a boot sector (this is how you can chain partitions in an extended partition). The bootloader doesn't play with that, yo.

You need a primary partition to boot to.
 
Whoops, this is a primary partition. But here's another clue I got from Partition Magic: on an info screen it says "This partition crosses the 1024 cylinder boundary and may not be bootable" It looks like I could cut this partition down to like 8GB and it would work. How is this possible? On this motherboard I've had 80GB hard drives running.
 
If you have a windows 98 Boot disk around, fdisk this baby. First fdisk /mbr, then Fdisk and delete all non-DOS partitions, then shut down, restart, and format the entire dirve as FAT-32. When done, use the Windows XP disk to reboot, reformat, repartition, etc. Make your primary partition bootable, format it as NTFS, format whatever other partitions you create for Linux or whatever you want.

On a drive that size, I may be stating the obvious, but just in case. You need to have an 80 conductor, 40 connector Ultra DMA ATA100/133 ATA cable on it to begin to get full performance. You might also want to get an ATA controller card if there is not one on your motherboard. They run about $19 to $29 depending on where.

OR
Go to the Western Digital site and download the drive preparation tools, read ALL the stuff on that site related to that drive and other large Western Digital drives. You will find the Western Digital software easy and very useful. Their detailed information on how to use the drive is also excellent.
 
Here's an update. I have no idea what's going on. I've got the drive working now by setting it to cable select. It's humming away right next to me installing XP. I tried fdisk /mbr and that didn't help either.

Other than a physical wiring problem (broken trace on a pcb) I can't think of a reason that jumping it to 'master' FUBARs it. Does anyone have a good explanation? I'm 100% stumped.
 
on alot of current drives, master actually means master with something else as slave. if you're running the drive as single (the only thing on the chain), you can just remove the jumper or turn in sideways (horizontal)
 
sorry if this sounds dumb.
But when you try to set the wd drive as master do you totally remove jumper( jumperless)?
if not, pleast try posting it that way.
if you do, i'm fresh outta ideas.
Good luck
 
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