PCTech Forums

here's the deal...

I have a Compaq with windows 98. I took a hardrive out a computer with windows 95. i installed it into the compaq computer and whenever i try to boot i get a boot disk failure please insert system disk and press enter. i never reformatted the windows 95 hard drive. how can i get it to boot up and reformat the other hard drive for storage use?

When your computer boots, it should give you a listing of all disk drives that it detects.
Check these boot displays to see if the master and slave drives are recognized.
If the BIOS will not recognize the drive either, you will need to check the jumper configuration on your drives.
The jumpers to configure your drive are usually between the power connector and the data cable.
Typically there are some diagrams on the hard drive itself that show you how to jumper the drive.
Your old hard drive should already be set up as the "master" device for the cable it is on right now.

How you setup the jumper on the second drive depends on where you are connecting it.
If your going to be adding your new drive to the IDE cable that your old hard drive is on, then you should leave your old drive as it is (set as master) and set up the new hard drive as the "Slave".

If your old hard drive is sharing a cable with say your CD-Rom and you want to add your new hard drive to the secondary hard drive controller then you should set the hard drive up as the "Master" device and anything else sharing the same IDE ribbon cable on the secondary IDE controller as slave.