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jessearl

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 7, 2005
89
0
I've got a PC that had it's hard drive crash. This PC doesn't have a CD-Rom or floppy drive, so the replacement hard drive I bought had to be put in another CD to have the operating system loaded.

Well, I loaded the new OS on the hard drive. But when I moved the new replacement hard drive with its working operating system over to the PC which needed it, the computer wouldn't boot past the "Starting Windows" screen.

What else could be wrong with this PC other than the fact that it needed a new hard drive? Or, could the original hard drive have been fine all along and something else is the problem?
 
Mmmmm, broken hard drive, no CD drive, OS problems, sounds to me like its time to think about a new computer. I hear those computers from Apple are quite good? :rolleyes:
 
Not all installs for windows are the same. You may try moving the CD drive to the other machine, and installing that way.
 
trainguy77 said:
Not all installs for windows are the same. You may try moving the CD drive to the other machine, and installing that way.

Indeed. Windows loves device drivers that are specific to a piece of hardware and usually does not contain generic drivers that work across all similar hardware. Installing with the hard drive in one PC and then moving the drive to another PC, unless the systems are nearly identical, is very likely not going to work. It could be anything from power management working on one system that isn't working on the other, or it could be the IDE driver is incompatible (ie. Windows installed one which was specific to the IDE controller in the one system, but your system has a different brand IDE controller so the driver can't work with it).

Or it might be something in the hidden boot.ini file that's at the root of your boot drive. If Windows was installed with this drive as disk2, well now it's trying to boot up as disk2 and can't find Windows because the drive is now disk1.

On that note, many people enjoy booting MacOS X from external hard drives, secondary hard drives, etc. It's a built-in feature on Macs.
 
jessearl said:
What else could be wrong with this PC other than the fact that it needed a new hard drive? Or, could the original hard drive have been fine all along and something else is the problem?


Mac Forums > Mac Hardware > Mac Basics and Help > PC Hard Drive Help

:confused:
 
yellow said:
Mac Forums > Mac Hardware > Mac Basics and Help > PC Hard Drive Help

:confused:

Mac User > PowerBook > Broken PC at Work Trying to Fix > MacRumors only computer-related board Jessearl visits

How hard is it to help a guy out? Geez.
 
Thats the best help I can give you aside from walking you through the steps... put a CD drive in the computer you're trying to fix along with the new hard drive and install windows using that computer. If that doesn't fix it then its a hardware related problem.
 
It's a bit hard to make suggestions if you don't know what your options are. If, indeed, you can put a CD drive in the "faulty" PC then that is almost certainly the simplest method of installing Windows. Alternatively, if your PC has a USB socket and the BIOS supports booting from USB (I know my old Epox board does since it drives me nuts when I forget to take the USB drive out and have rebooted) then it may be possible to copy Windows to a large USB drive and boot in that fashion (I'm not 100% certain that this is really possible, incidentally). Finally, if it is available, you can install Windows across a network. I have the MCSE core books for Windows 2000 which I never progressed very far through (yup, what a wonder waste of money that was) but I do recall that you can install Windows 2000 from the network if you can boot the PC with enough drivers to connect (probably easier said than done in this case).

Anyway, option 1 (install CD drive) is definitely the way to go, if at all possible.

Not sure about some of the other posts about Windows installs not working on other PCs. I seem to recall having completely changed my hardware in a PC many years ago running Windows 95, kept the old hard drive, and was able to boot the PC without reinstalling Windows. Of course, during booting there was a ******** of new drivers loaded and eventually I ended up formatting/reinstalling Windows (too many conflicts with the old settings) but it did at least boot into Windows so I know that it is possible, just not recommended.
 
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