my brother recently bought a dell dimension 3000, and i want to switch from the current drive to my old maxtor 40 gb hard drive. everytime i unplug the old drive, and plug in the new one, and then start up the dell, it would say that the master drive is missing or sumthing. i've tried to tweak the bios settings, and i still get the same results. is there a fix for this? do i have to tweak the bios settings?

Are the Master/Slave jumpers set correctly?

Hello NuRuKi,

A question for you;

QUOTE

i want to switch from the current drive to my old maxtor 40 gb hard drive. everytime i unplug the old drive, and plug in the new one, and then start up the dell....

The Dimension 3000 comes with an 80 gig Harddrive standard with XP home pre-installed; do I understand correctly that you want to substitute an older 40 gig HD for the 80 gig, or the other way around?

IF the above case is true, what operating system do you have on your old drive?

It sounds like the BIOS cannot find the MBR for the drive you want to substitute, but right now I am not clear on what you are exactly doing. Could you clarify, please?

Have you tried to install the Maxtor 40 GB as slave disk ? (And then try to reinstall some OS on it before switching - means replacing it? - from one HD to another)...

QUOTE

The Dimension 3000 comes with an 80 gig Harddrive standard with XP home pre-installed; do I understand correctly that you want to substitute an older 40 gig HD for the 80 gig, or the other way around?

im trying to subsitute dell's 80 gb HD for my old 40 gb HD (remove dell's hd, put in my old one). on my 40 gb HD which im trying to install, it has windows xp pro on it.

QUOTE

Have you tried to install the Maxtor 40 GB as slave disk ?

yes, i've tried but it doesn't work

I will assume that the XP Pro OS installation on your 40gig has no corruptions, and when you removed it booted clean into XP with no hangs.

Hopefully you have an independent XP system disk. If you have only a restore disk you are out of luck.

Boot into the BIOS and set your CDrom to 1st boot device. Reboot with the XP disk you originally used to install the 40gig in the CDrom, and the XP install screen will show. It will offer you a system repair option using the Repair Consol; Do NOT use that one. A couple of screens further it will offer the option of a repair-reinstall of XP. Use that one, and it will overwrite the critical system files, in this case the MBR, and should make the OS on your 40gig bootable, but leave your data and installed programs. Be careful not to specify a Fresh Install, which will overwrite everything. Make sure your 40gig is set to Master.

Don't forget, you can install your 80gig as Slave and use it for storage, or even install an operating system on it as a Dual Boot setup.

ahh i see, thanks for the help