HELP: primary vs. slave

[zskillz]

I just installed a new moboard, and I can't get it to recognize the hard drive as the primary master instead it recognizes it as the slave....
any help is much appreciated

[Roy]

Check the HD jumpers. If it's the only drive, set it for single, not master or slave.

[zskillz]

well, i did that... (thx it worked) but for some reason that apparently isn't the problem...
upon bootup, i get this message...
not found any [active partition] in HDD
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISKETTE AND PRESS ENTER

[Roy]

I'm assuming the HD contains data and was booting with the previous mobo. If so, 'tis a mystery beyond my knowledge.

If not, it sounds like the system tracks are not on the HD. Try booting with a startup floppy, go to the DOS prompt a: and type sys c: <enter>. That will write the system to the HD. Maybe then it will be recognized and handle the boot.

[thewsman]

I ran into a similar problem. The hard drive I moved was an 850MB drive out of an older system. The older BIOS's were not capable of recognizing drives greater than about 528 MB. To get the system to recognize the entire drive, special software was on the hard drive. I don't know what this software does, but everytime I moved the hard drive, I had to reinstall the software which, in turn, reformatted and repartitioned the drive. After saying all this, if the sys c: does not work, try booting up with the floppy and running fdisk.

thewsman

[Ed_S]

thewsman's right, HD makers used a drive utility to enable drives over 540mb on older systems. Once that util has been installed, it can be tough to get rid of. WD, for example, used Ontrack Disk Manager, which required the bios to be set to type 1 (no matter what 1 is) to work. Had one set up this way, when moved to newer sys I just set the bios to 1 again, even though it found the drive, and my data was again accessable. But when allowed to boot using the correct settings, I got the same error you do now.