Seagate 250GB pata works fine, won't boot XP

[mikeford]

ECS nforce2 MB, NU400, 1 GB ram, XP sp2, was running on a 160 GB maxtor, but I was down to 1 Gb free, so I bought a Seagate 250 Gb 7200.8 drive, set the jumper and put it on the slave IDE connection, seagate software was a bit clunky, kind of insists on running under windows, then gripes about other applications running, sheesh I have 36 processes and no applications running, but no idea what I need to kill beyond stuff in the tray like the virus checker.

Anyway, I format the drive NTFS 100% which makes one partition of 232 GB, select the option to copy old drive to new and remove old drive. Takes all night to do the 151 GB, but checking random files etc. all seems to have gone fine.

Changed the jumpers to make the seagate master and removed the original and put on the seagate as master.

Doesn't boot, its like for booting it doesn't even see a drive. Seagate does show up fine in the bios, but just won't boot. The ATA 100 80 wire cable that the Maxtor was using is identical to the one that came with the Seagate drive, but still swapped them, no change.

Going now to check for bios updates, but not counting on that helping. Ideas?

BTW I did try to search, but nothing was coming up on seagate xp or boot.

 

[InlineFour]

let me see if i understand what you just did.

1) installed new drive
2) copied all the files/folders from old drive to new drive.
3) unistalled the old drive and expected the new drive to boot up into windows.

i'm pretty sure you can't just click and drop all the files in the C: drive and expect it to boot up into windows.

 

[mikeford]

Nope, I used the seagate disk wizard, step by step instructions that are supposed to do just what I said. The copy does not appear to be the issue, more some bios or XP related to ATA100 UDMA, not even a large drive thing.

 

[furballi]

Set the new drive as MASTER on the Primary IDE channel. Leave the Slave connector open. Set jumper to MASTER or CS. Reset BIOS. Reboot PC. Once done with the disc clone. Shut off power and disconnect the drive. If you reboot PC after cloning drive with both drives in place, new data will be added to the new HDD. This may be the issue.

 

[InlineFour]

i suggest settings the jumper to cable select next time you install a new HDD. it prevents mixing master and slave confusions.

 

[mikeford]

I don't have any jumper setting trouble, Master for Master, slave for slave, for some reason in the past CS has been unreliable for me. Going over all the stuff again now.

Trying suggestions so far, and looking into bios updates.

 

[Jiggz]

Assuming the cloning or copying was OK, how about try just having one hdd (seagate)installed and make sure it is jumpered right for single hdd operation. If it still does not boot, try booting off XP CD and go to Recovery Console and then choose Fixboot and Fixmbr commands to recreate the boot sector and fat tables. Then try again. If it still does not work, you might have to do a Repair Installation. You won't lose anything except you have to reinstall all XP updates and have to reactivate XP. Menus and programs will stay the same. Do not format the old hdd until you have satisfactorily transferred everything to the new hdd. You might also want to try using the maxblast software that came with the maxtor drive or download one. It has served me well.

 

[Bozo Galora]

there is nothing wrong with settings or drive
Cloning non O/S partitionss ARE a snap, however "Cloning" a HDD with an O/S is not a slam dunk. .Thats why ghost was invented to IMAGE a drive.
XP repair install on seagate MAY load all necessary booting files like ntldr ntdetect boot.ini and the Hal on the new drive, if it can actually detect some kind of install. However I think your "clone" is now a big mess, not worth saving. even if you got it to work, it may fail at some future date.

Unfortunately I have never used Seagate to copy a hard drive, so I cant say whats going on there, or how they deal with hidden files/hidden system files. However you must stop all processes except kernal - you cant copy a moving target. Thats why ghost is run from booting media.

 

[mikeford]

Seagate tools are apparently a "lite" version of the OnTrack utility software, and if they don't reliably transfer a OS install I suspect I would see many many posts about it not working, so I think that part is OK. The caveat I would put to that is that I know I have to beat my system with a stick to get enough stuff turned off for defrag to work (manually killing stuff in the ctrl alt delete display of processes).

NTFS was used for the single partition, but same was on the Maxtor 160 GB.

Booted with the XP install CD, ran restore console thing, and it doesn't see any drive and quits. Checkdisk finds no errors, and I am not ready to format and move the 151 GB again just yet, but maybe as a last step tonight.

ECS shows a 1.0a and 1.0b bios update, mine has 1.0e almost a year newer 8/31/04.

Ironically ghost is one of the things I can't seem to get rid of on the old drive, so maybe I give it a try. I am betting NTFS is one of the complicating factors, since MS sets on the code.

Trying more later.

BTW the drive is super quiet, very nice.

 

[Bozo Galora]

why would you want a bios update for an IDE drive? If your 160 worked, your 250 will work

And, I didnt say restore console, I said repair install.

say "NO" to repair using the console and then to repair instead of install on the next screen

 

[mikeford]

Bios because the 1.0b update is specifically about seagate drives not being recognized, hopefully not an issue to me since I already flashed to 1.0e

Restore/ repair, I gave it a couple chances, but I used the OEM Nero to burn my XP SP2 slipstream and apparently it fubared the CD boot so the CD only works when a bootable XP drive is already in the system. My normal XP CD booted fine, but would have had >137GB issues, so I didn't continue trying.

MaxBlast4, downloaded the 75MB zipped .iso file, burnt the CD, boots fine, and surprize, the software is the exact SAME OnTrack stuff from Kroll rebadged for Maxtor instead of SeaGate. It was booted, so I decided to give it a try, but it is INSANELY slow, 12 hours later I am at 43% (working now on another PC), so sometime tomorrow it should be done and I can see if it boots. (meaning the issue was maybe something running in windows while I tried the suggested windows version of the SeaGate (OnTrack) setup tools).

If it still doesn't boot, then I work more on the repair thing, which a couple places suggested it would be needed anyway.

OBO overlay, dunno exactly what this is, but a few threads mention that SeaGate modifies the boot track with some patch/extension called OBO overlay, related to >137GB and/or dual boot situations, and that it should be REMOVED, but I didn't write down the details, and didn't see the remove dialog during my last attempts. Its also on my list of stuff to check.

 

[Bozo Galora]

O.K. didnt know about the bios seagate issue - my bad.

And drive overlays are the worst softwares ever invented. It is the single most prevalent cause of Ghosting and Partition Magic failures. Fdisk/mbr (twice - theres a copy) supposedly removes it - but if I know theres an overlay, I always low level format anyway (zero fill)
I am also wondering when you cloned the maxtor, if it had an overlay installed

As i recall, Seagate asks (there are about 20 versions now of DiskManager - every one a little different) during the manual install porcess if you want to "add large disk support for a system that does not support it". What it does in auto, I dont know.
I would think your NF2 wouldnt need it. If you have somehow installed overlay, that is def your problem. I would check manual to see if it supports big drives.
So put in a win98 boot floppy and do the fdisk/mbr thingy (twice)
If that doesnt work, do LLF.

Quote:
Drive overlays - programs designed to overcome BIOS limitations. These program have different names, for example: EZ-Drive (Western Digital), Disk Manager (Seagate), MaxBlast (Maxtor). They are usually supplied with retail-packaged HDDs, and are also available from HDD manufacturers' websites.

When a drive overlay program runs during the boot sequence, it installs a small program that replaces some of the BIOS's drive access services with its own routines. Therefore, in order to access the drive, you must boot from the drive where the drive overlay was installed. If you boot from another drive (diskette, CDROM, another HD), chances are you won't see the "overlayed" drive's partitions.

To uninstall a drive overlay program, you should use it's uninstall feature. The more "low-level" way of doing this - and losing all the files on the drive - is booting from another drive, and typing "FDISK /MBR". At this point, the drive overlay will be overwritten, and looking in FDISK, you'll see "non-DOS" partitions instead of your formerly overlay-driven partitions. You can simply delete them, and create new, overlay-free partitions.
---------------------------------------------

I assume you are trying to load XP on Seagate with just it connected - no maxtor.

Just LLF the drive (utility on SG website), use disc wizard to partition/format 2 partitions of 125GB (will be 116)
load XP

 

[mikeford]

When I installed XP on the Maxtor I cheated, I stuck in a Promise controller which supports large drives, format, installed XP, installed SP1/2, then pulled the promise card since SP2 includes large drive support.

Double ugh, one of the options on the MaxBlast software was something called PowerMax (something like that), I didn't see any info so I clicked it assuming it would say what it does before doing anything nasty, but it just did whatever it does and returned to the menu. Smells like overlay.

20+ hours into file copy I am at 72%, not doing a darn thing until it finishes some time tomorrow. If it doesn't work, trying XP CD and repair, and/or removing the overlay., not even thinking of a LLF yet. Maybe I stick in the promise card. Insane how slow this file copy runs from dos.

 

[Bozo Galora]

Quote from Seagate PDF:

Alternatively, BIOS support for ATA>137GB can also be accomplished by putting the necessary boot code on the disc drive itself. This small bit of programming emulates the BIOS support so that when the higher-level operating system drivers begin to launch they can "see" the full potential capacity of the drive. Seagate provides hard disc installation software called DiscWizard to help with this task. DiscWizard writes boot code called a DDO on discs that do not have native BIOS support for the full capacity of the drive. DiscWizard only writes the DDO when required.
Note: It is a common misconception that the DDO is some kind of memory resident program or that it has the potential to slow disc access by being in memory. Like all BIOS routines, the
DDO is discarded from memory after about 5 seconds into the launch of the operating
system when the 32-bit direct access device drivers take over. The DDO exists only to
detect and then present the full capacity of the disc drive to these operating system device
drivers.

 

[mikeford]

27 hours later MaxBlast4 completes the format and copy, pop out the CD, reboot, and XP says the drive is fine, but not formatted, so does SeaGate DiskWizard software.

Put in the XP CD and tried repair, only shows the C drive as having windows installed.

Booted off the C drive (old maxtor), and now running windows version of Seagate DiskWizard to format and copy. Last time that at least showed all the files, so maybe if it doesn't boot the repair with the XP CD will work.

What a time sink.