Problem getting new HD to work in older system

[QueBert]

Bought a 40 gig Maxtor drive today. Put it in my friends computer, not exactly sure which MB he has, it's a 667MHZ Celeron system though. I ran Maxblast3 and told it I wanted to make the new drive the boot drive. So it copied everything off, and told me to power off the system and set it to master and when I boot it'll work. So I do that, and when it boots up I get the "F8" windows menu and regardless what I select it comes up with a "cannot find command.com" I don't have a boot disk handy so I plug in the old HD as master again, and boot into XP. When I go into explorer I see the new HD is F:, with both cd drives before it. I've never seen a HD come after an optical drive. It's on the primary cable as the slave right now. I'm not going back until the morning. But I was wondering if anyone else has seen a HD come up last on the drive chain? I know his bios doesn't support 40GB partitions, but Maxblast3 is supposed to take care of that right?

oh also have a quick memory question. He's at 192 right now, I told him to add more, we bought a 256MG pc133 stick @ BB. Put it in and it won't even Post. I've never had a problem putting 133 memory in a system that is only 100. I am not sure about the MB brand/specs. I don't want to pull it out to look on the bottom for the makers tag. I bought this MB for him probably 3 years ago. It has 2 dimm slots, what's the odds that putting pc100 will work? I'm thinking it might have a 128 meg single stick limit



suggestions?

thanks

 

[pyrojunkie]

Maxblast doesn't get around size limitations understood by BIOS, but a BIOS shouldn't care about a partition at all. Normally a HD would be placed at a lower letter when it is either preset to it or the last drive on an IDE line (secondary slave). In explorer can you see if the HD was copied over properly?

Older Intel boards cannot read high-density RAM (nearly all PC-133 RAM is high density these days). It won't function correctly when placed into one of these boards. It sometimes doesn't see it and sometimes counts it as much lower than it really is. You must use "low density" RAM. Its rarer and cost more, but its the only solution to adding more memory. Boards also have size limitations on memory, but a 256mb limit sounds a little low. Can't tell for sure its size limitation, until you get the Mobo specs.

 

[jackschmittusa]

QueBert
No offense intended, but it doesn't sound like you know enough about computers to be working on other people's machines.
pyrojunkie gave you the right answer about the ram.
"but Maxblast3 is supposed to take care of that right?" - you are talking about a drive overlay. So, did it install one or not? can't see from here.
Yes, hard drives can be assigned letters beyond those of the optical drives.
You can download a boot disk from bootdisk.com
There are several free utilities you can download that will identify the mb. I use Aida32.
I would set the new drive as master, old as slave. Boot from Maxblast. Select new drive as "target", old drive as "source". When it says everything on the target drive will be lost, say ok.
The new drive should be the c: drive and bootable when you are done.

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
QueBert
No offense intended, but it doesn't sound like you know enough about computers to be working on other people's machines.
pyrojunkie gave you the right answer about the ram.
"but Maxblast3 is supposed to take care of that right?" - you are talking about a drive overlay. So, did it install one or not? can't see from here.
Yes, hard drives can be assigned letters beyond those of the optical drives.
You can download a boot disk from bootdisk.com
There are several free utilities you can download that will identify the mb. I use Aida32.
I would set the new drive as master, old as slave. Boot from Maxblast. Select new drive as "target", old drive as "source". When it says everything on the target drive will be lost, say ok.
The new drive should be the c: drive and bootable when you are done.

I know plenty about pc's, I'm A+, CNE & MCP certified, been on pc's since my 8088. I've never used max blaster. Normally I would use ghost or my boot disk to get in his system. Problem there he doesn't have a floppy and his system won't boot with my boot cd (made from an image on bootdisk.com) but it will boot with the DR-DOS boot cd I have, but that doesn't have fdisk on it and I can't transfer system files from it. I asked about Maxblast because I've never used it, and I know the HD makers ship with a program that writes itself to your MBR to override your bios's limitation, which on his MB I believe is 12GB *shrug*

And I was un-aware of NT being able to assign drive letters until you mentioned, thanks for that BTW I just looked into it and it makes sense now. I don't run windows myself, or really mess with it unless I have to so I don't know about stuff like this