Issues moving a hard drive to a different computer.

[LeftCoast]

Hi all,

I'm trying to move a copy of my brother's HDD to my PowerEdge 400SC (WD 20 gig,win 2000 pro,running on a K6-550). I made the copy on his machine to a new WD 40 gig HDD and moved it to the power edge, but get the blue screen of death with the "inaccessable boot device" error message. When I move it back to the original computer it boots no problem.

It's pretty important to me that I make it work, as I need to get the computer back to his widow, and I have to access my copy to get his personal website back up on line(help with the Dreamweaver upload is for another topic!).

Any ideas would be appreciated.

-LC

Did you just copy the whole drive? OS, drivers and boot record?

[MitaDC]

Does it get into windows? I don't think u can just copy a drive like that unless you install his mobo drivers...

[LeftCoast]

I just made an exact copy of the HDD using the utility provided by Western Digital. On the original machine, it boots up fine, as if it's the original HDD (which makes sense, as it is an exact copy). On the new machine(the one I'm trying to migrate the HDD copy to), it stops during the POST and displays "Primary drive 1 not found. Press F1 to continue,F2 to enter setup."

When I hit F1, some WD app comes on (Dynamic Overlay???) for a second then the WIN2000 "boot bar" starts going left to right, all seems well, then the blue screen with the "inaccessable boot device" error message.

Again, the copy works fine with the original computer, so the problem lies in the migration to the new system.

Thanks guys, for your attention.

-LC

[Bill in SD, CA]

Maybe this will help.

CHANGING MOTHERBOARDS AND KEEPING WINDOWS

Bill

[john_phoenix]

I suggest checking your geometry settings in both machines and making sure that they are both the same.
Dell's are known for reading the geometry different.

See what the setting in your BIOS on the old machine are then use user defined in the new machine to make them the same