ERROR LOADING OPERATING SYSTEM!

[the.raven]

hi people I'm new here, registered because I cant find anyone to help me with this. sorry for the long read.

apparently my old harddrive was kind of repartitioned or something. I recently got a new hard drive.

I connected my new ATA-100 200G harddisk to the computer and I booted the computer up but it did not show the new drive letter. so I thought maybe I should just install windowsXP on that drive and use it as my primary drive. (I didnt really know what I was doing, but I thought that was supposed to work)

so I took out the old drive which was a ATA-133 60G harddisk and put the new disk in its place, then connected the old disk in another part of the cable. I did not change the master/slave setting and both disks were in master. then I tried to boot up from a winXP CD . The CD only detected my old drive, and tried to install windows on it. I thought maybe I connected the cables wrongly so I canceled the install and reconnected the cables and I also changed the new drive setting to master/single and the old drive was still master because I thought it does not matter. now the CD tried to install on the new drive

after the installation was done, and I tried to boot up, it says "error loading operating system" during boot up. I found out that this happens only when the old drive is plugged in, when I disconnect it, the computer could boot up from the new drive. the BIOS shows that the boot up drive is the new drive, yet the old drive prevents it from booting up. I changed the setting of the old drive to slave, and this still occurs, I then put only my old drive in the computer as master, which was exactly how it was before, and this still happens. the only thing that happend to it was that the windows tried to install on it but I canceled the installation. and now the disk seems to be corrupt. the winXP disk must have done something to it, like repartitioned it, this is really screwed up.

I cannot reformat that disk because there are too many important things in it and I dont even know if reformatting will help because this problem is very strange, nothing was done to the harddrive yet there is this problem.


can someone pls help me......  

[Joe chonk]

Make sure you have your new drive jumpered as master w/slave and your old drive jumpered as slave.

[Dr Wahab]

Hello, how are you? First of all wellcome to computer hope.
You write that your new hard disk is of 200GB hard disk and you didn't write the capacity of your old hard disk. First of all make sure that your MOTHERBOARD support such a huge ammount of hard disk.
If yes then make your new hard disk as "MASTER" and old one as slave. Then transfer the data.
Secondly another way is to boot from Windows 98 BOOTABLE CD or floppy then tranfer your data.
Hope this will solve your problem.
Take care of you and others and be happy...bye
Dur-E-Wahab

[the.raven]

hi my old drive was 60G. my  motherboard is 2 years old, I think it should be able to support  it.

now that it has been screwed up, no matter what I set the jumpers to , I tried master and slave and the error still occurs. even if the old drive is slave, or set as master after I took out the new drive.

this problem really sux. do you think bootdisk will help? what I think is that the winXP setup disk tried to repartition my old drive (maybe I connected the cables wrong initially so it thought I wanted to install windows on it, but I dont understand what the setup could have done to it because I canceled the installation at the beginning)