new hard drive won't become the master

[DougF]

I just installed a new Western Digital WD1600JBRTL3 and want to make it the master drive. I made it a boot drive and cloned all the programs from my old drive when I formated it and did the partition but when I switched the cable and jumper I couldn't boot into Windows. (It goes to a black screen where it properly identifies the CD and DVD players but then goes to a DOS prompt for X: drive) Anybody have any ideas on what I may have done wrong or forgotten before I spend an arm and a leg getting it into a computer repair shop? Thanks. :vxd:

[AMD]

There's a difference between Master with slave and Master without slave on western digital drives - recheck the jumper.

Disconnect the old hard drive and attempt to boot. Ensure that it is detected properly in the BIOS.

You can't just copy everything over and expect it to work - information in the boot sector needs to be moved over as well using a utility. Most hard drive manufacturers offer a free program to prepare the disk surface (partition + format) and ghost everything over.

[woodpusher]

Get Data Lifeguard Tools (http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=1) to install the new drive.

"The downloadable Data Lifeguard Tools now comes in both DOS and Windows versions and was written specifically for the installation of Western Digital EIDE hard drives."

[DougF]

I used Data Lifeguard tools to make the new drive bootable and to do the copy and I have the cable and jumper set properly. The drive shows up properly in BIOS as the primerary master drive but still I can't get into it.

[Frogy]

Have you configured the drive itself as master or is it set to slave?

[DougF]

As per the instructions from WD I've set the drive at the end of the cable so it's the master and there are no jumpers on the drive itself so it should be picked up as master (cable select). Just in case that was a problem I also tried setting the jumper in the master position (middle set of pins), neither worked. WD swears I have a good drive.

[Frogy]

You could try another cable and test with it, check your boot.ini file and make sure it's set correctly also.

[sybil]

Check and see if there is a hard disk boot priority setting in the bios (Advanced Bios features, Hard disk boot priority). If you have that setting, make sure the new drive with WinXP is listed first.