help with western digi hard drive

solomon68 · 9th February 2003

I'm hoping i can get a little help with my new western digital hard drive. we took the old hard drive out, and put the new one in and keep getting the same error. it's the same company as our old hard drive, just bigger. as it boots up, we get the error:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSTERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

the BIOS recognizes the drive, but we don't know what the problem is. can you offer any help? since our computer is broken, it might be 2 days before i can respond, but any help is greatly appreciated.

thanks.

**Rockster2U** · 9th February 2003

This is what it should do.

You have no operating system on the new drive and no partition table on this unformatted drive. You will need to put a boot disk (Win98 recommended) in your floppy drive and then Fdisk and Format your new Hard drive. Then you need to put an operating system on the drive.

Alex Ethridge · 10th February 2003

Do you mean to tell us that hard disks aren't sold preloaded with the latest operating system and all the programs one already has on the old drive?

mflynn · 10th February 2003

You guys..................

You crack me up!

Ok Sol

Go to www.WesternDigital.com and download the data life guard tools.

This is a set of bootable floppys that will format and partition the drive quickly and safely.

And has diagnostics to tell you if you have a problem with the new or old drive.

Once it has formated and preped the new disk, it will allow you to hook up the old drive and xfer the whole drive from the old to the new.

Assuming it is really not bad!!!! It would be worth trying because from what you say about the old and new having the same problem it is possible that it had only lost the ability to boot.

Mike

solomon68 · 10th February 2003

thanks for the help guys. i'll run your suggestions by my brother and see if he has anymore questions.

thanks again

Alex Ethridge · 14th February 2003

Sounds like you are simply in over your head. I suspect you don't have a working knowledge of what a system disk is, what a path is and how it is established, how to load CD-ROM drivers, etc. etc. I don't mean to be critical; that is not at all my intention. I know you should be able to get help here; but, I think you should check your list of friends and see if there is anyone on it that might be able to give you some in-front-of-the-machine help.

What part of the world do you live in. If the US, I might volunteer some telephone help (on your nickel, of course). If you live in the southeastern region of the US, I have plenty of cell phone minutes I don't use each month and the call could be free to you.