[navnut]

Hi
I have a an old comp, Athlon XP 3000 112GB 2G Ram etc, and an even older 20GB hard drive which i want to add to the system so i can retrive some old files. But "My computer" will not even display the hard drive. I have the power and IDE cable plugged in and set the jumper to slave but it just wont show up. Is it because the old drive is Win 98 and current is XP?
Can u guys suggest anything that can help me?

[Dave Hybrid]

First get it showing in the BIOS then assign it a drive letter.

This should help: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000

[navnut]

Thank u i can now read the drive.
Just wanted to know if i could transfer these files to my current drive or will that create a problem with fat32 being brought over to a NTFS drive?
Thanks again mate

[spot]

There's no partition type problem, once the files are visible they're just files.

[Dave Hybrid]

Cool, you're welcome.

[navnut]

Hello again guys
I have a new problem i have virus scanned my old drive i had something like 22 viruses on it, i have since deleted these( i think).
I have also have deleted some of the windows installation files to free up space.
The problem i am having now is my computer will not bootup when the old drive is plugged in. It will go through the intial scanning ram for erors detecting IDE drives but it never gets to the blue XP screen with the logo. It will just hang on a blank black screen. The BIOS is still configured to auto detect the primary slave drive.
Does anything that i have done to drive explain why this has happened?
Thanks again

[spot]

Not that I can work out, no. Sometimes you have to put a drive back in to be able to get to the BIOS to set the drive to "No Drive" and then power down to remove it, but you're doing this the other way about.

You're saying that with the old drive out your system boots, but with it in it gets past the BIOS and then hangs? If that's so, all I can suggest is to start up with the drive out and then look under Disk Management to see if anything shows up that shouldn't. At a pinch you could do into Control Panel / System and delete the slave disk controller, let it re-install when you restart with the old drive back in place.

What happens if you use the BIOS "scan for drives" and accept, with the old drive in? Does it set it properly as the primary slave? I'm sure that would make no difference to XP though.

[philthomas]

Try slaving it on the Secondary Channel and see what happens.

[navnut]

Just to update, even when i adjust the primary slave to "None" the PC will not boot up if the old drive is still plugged in with molex power connector. Does this mean PC is trying to boot from the old hard drive when the molex is connected to it even though the bios is set to original HDD that came with the PC.
I just can't understand why it was working just over a day ago and now it wont.
Thanks

[spot]

It could be that you inadvertently jumbled the jumpers and they're not master/slave any longer and you've not noticed. It's possible your PSU is expiring though I dislike coincidences. It's possible you've crushed a pin in one of the drives with the IDE cable, you might squint close and make sure they're all erect. One's meant to be missing so check the cable to see which it is.