power supply: 5400 rpm vs. 7200 rpm?

[Busie23]

I just setup an HP pavillion with a clean install of XP sp2. It runs like crap on the 5400 drive and 128 mb ram, so I figured I would throw in another stick of ram and ghost an old 7200 I had laying around.

I didn't get it to boot to the OS so I thought maybe I mixed up the ghost, or had some bad ram/HD, etc. I even cloned two more 7200 drives and they both don't boot either.

I then noticed the power supply on this thing: Bestec ATX100-5. It's a hundred watts only! Could my skimpy 20gb 7200 drive be throwing this thing off so much that it won't boot? I didn't think it would draw that much more power than the 40gb 5400 drive?

Bios is updated and the newer stick of ram was removed just to rule out those as the problem?

 

[DaveSimmons]

When you ghosted did you make sure to make the copy the first primary parttiion on the 7200 drive, and to make it Active? It has to be primary and active to boot.

Also, lack of RAM was 90% of the problem so you might just go back to the 5400 RPM with the extra stick of RAM and see how that works.

 

[Busie23]

the added ram and 5400 was still pretty poor. I hooked up the other ghosted drives to another pc earlier today and they booted and started detecting new hardware, etc. I wish I had another spare PS laying around so I could just ghook it up and rule that out as the problem.

 

[Aluvus]

Do you have the models of the drives?

The power draw of a hard drive at startup can be fairly large, and yes it is possible that is preventing the system from booting.

 

[imported_rod]

Will the PC boot with the 5400 hdd and the new + old ram (So with everything except the 7200rpm drive)?

RoD

 

[thunderhorse]

On the second machine how large was the PSU and how much ram did it have? Personaly, I have never had XP run very well with less than 512 mb memory. If it worked in another machine then I'd say you are first short on ram and then light on power. I have only purchased one premanufactured machine and that was a laptop. This is just my openion, from personal experence. Believe me I'm still learning and I am surprised sometimes at the simple mistakes I make. If I make them enough I'll learn from them or stay ignorant, hahaha. I hope I've shed some light.

 

[Busie23]

Originally posted by: Aluvus
Do you have the models of the drives?

The power draw of a hard drive at startup can be fairly large, and yes it is possible that is preventing the system from booting.

original drive: maxtor 5400 rpm 40.9 GB model 34098h4
newer drive: maxtor 7200 rpm 19 GB model 52049H4
newer drive #2 maxtor 7200 rpm 30 GB model? Diamond max plus 8. No model on label?

Will the PC boot with the 5400 hdd and the new + old ram (So with everything except the 7200rpm drive)?RoD

Yes the system boots fine with the old 5400 drive and the old stick of ram plus the new stick of ram.

There has to be something that I'm missing here. I found an old power supply that I had laying around and plugged that in to the HP along with one of the 7200 ghosted drives. Still no boot? I see the blue HP spalsh screen and then just get a blinking cursor, just like when nothing is detected.

I thought for sure that the ghosted drive has to be hosed so I hooked that up as a slave on my main pc and sure enough all of the files are there, etc.? There is no way I ghosted the wrong partition etc., since there was only one partition on the orginal drive and only one on the new drive?

I thought maybe the bioas wasn't detecting the new drives, but that is set to auto detect adn it is in fact picking up each new drive I put in there?

Any other ideas?

 

[Busie23]

I just cloned the disk with the maxblast program to see if that made a difference. Still not getting anything?