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How do I swap out an IDE hard drive?

H

Hardball

Member
I have an older desktop system that I want to upgrade from XP to Win7. I think the existing hard drive might be bad as I am unable to get Win7 to install. I would like to temporarily swap out for a different hard drive in order to see if Win7 will successfully install on the other drive. I want to preserve the existing drive so that I can swap it back in after testing the other drive. Do I just simply power down the system and remove the existing drive and then put in the other drive for testing the Win7 install? Do I then just repeat the process to put the original hard drive with XP back in after testing the other? I was just wondering f there were any other steps involved in order to do this.
 
Pretty much yes,

Remove the old drive, look at the jumpers to make sure is master or slave or CS (Cable Select), should be master usually.

set the new drive jumpers to master, or match the old one if different

when you want to swap back, just remove the temp drive and re-hook up the old one
 
More details of the system help, Are you trying to install Win7 64 bit onto a 32bit only system?
 
Yes, it's pretty simple. You do need to match the jumper settings of the old drive though, if you expect to plug it into the same place.
 
The system in question is an old P4 1.6GHz on an Asus P4B266. It has the I845D dhipset, so it's IDE only (pre-SATA). It has XP Home 32 bit on it, and I want to put Win7 32 bit on. I have made several disks with the Win 7 Pro 32 bit .iso from Digital River. I have tried these same discs (Verbatim DVD+R) on my system at home and they all read and load just fine.

I bought a refurb WD IDE hard drive today to see if the drive was at fault. The same thing happened as before. Most of the time the disc will not be read at boot, other times it will, but it will get to a point where the install would start and it throws up a message about
"Load Driver: A required CD/DVD device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disc, CD, or USB flashdrive, please insert now. Note: If the Windows installation media is in the CD/DVD drive, you can safely remove it for this step."
I am starting to think that maybe the CD/DVD drive is going up, or it just can't read the Verbatim's properly? I put in the original XP Home disc and it booted right up and would be able to install it, no problem.

Any suggestions, other that to build a new system, which isn't on the agenda till end of year?
 
For reference, the computer that I tried it on at home and that works, is very close in spec to the problem system. Not a modern system at all, basically the same.
Also of note, there is a single IDE hard drive on IDE 1 as master, and the cd/dvd burner is on IDE 2 as master.
 
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If the BIOS already supports USB booting then try to make a bootable USB Windows installation disk and install Windows 7 from the USB bootable disk.
 
Unfortunately, this old system and it's bios do not support booting from USB. I picked up a Sony refurbed DVD drive and will give that a try tomorrow.
 
Turns out it was the Samsung CD/DVD burner. It would not properly read the Win 7 .iso disc that I created, with the same burner in question. I put in a $10 refurbed Sony and it read and loaded it without issue. Crazy.
 
Hardball said:
Turns out it was the Samsung CD/DVD burner. It would not properly read the Win 7 .iso disc that I created, with the same burner in question. I put in a $10 refurbed Sony and it read and loaded it without issue. Crazy.
Click to expand...

Good Find :thumbsup:
 
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