My Dell-to-Dell hard drive transplant has been rejected, and I'm baffled.
December 27, 2005 4:51 PM   Subscribe

My Dell-to-Dell hard drive transplant has been rejected, and I'm baffled.

I'm in the process of a not-very-sexy upgrade from an Optiplex GX1 to a GX150 (both P3s).

The GX1 is perfectly functional and will be re-gifted but I want the 80GB HD and it's contents. (It runs Win2000 and has just been declared virus-free by Norton, and me)

GX150 came with a 40GB HD, loaded XP fine and runs fine.

But when I plug the old HD into the new machine I get a blue screen warning me of hardware incompatibility or viruses. Both alone and in tandem with the new HD. Both HD jumpers are on "Cable Select"

Tried to bust my backup cherry to CD (in old machine) but got message: "Please insert CD" when a CD was in the tray. I'm wearing grooves in my skull from the head-scratching.

Why doesn't New Dell like Old Dell's hard drive?
posted by raider to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)
 
Leave the jumpers on the hard drive that came in the machine as you found them, and add the other hard drive to the machine with its jumpers set to "slave".

That should do it for you.
posted by jcruden at 5:02 PM on December 27, 2005


Response by poster: Sorry - upon review, the key point of my question was obscured: the new machine works fine.

It freaks out when the old HD is plugged in, using the exact same setup as the currently functional XP hard drive.
posted by raider at 5:14 PM on December 27, 2005


bios setting? sounds like some weird low-level attempt to detect changed hardware.
posted by andrew cooke at 5:23 PM on December 27, 2005


This rings a vague bell. I've seen models that had something purporting to be virus checking in the bios, presumably not signature-based but set to freak out when it sees something being done that it thinks ought not to be happening, e.g. writing to protected memory or reserved HD areas. See if you see anything like that (F2 at startup gets you the bios on both the GX1 and the GX150) and if there's any such thing there, turn in off.

Otherwise--with the 80gb drive in the 150, will it at least let you boot to safe mode? If so, go to device manager and delete every device driver you see. Then reboot and let Windows rerecognize all the hardware.

Oh. Generally if there's only one drive, there will be a jumper setting for "only drive," which is different from "master." I would go for "only."

Finally, you do have a backup of the stuff you want to preserve, yesno? If all else fails you can (with the backup safely on the shelf) fdisk the drive while it's mounted in the GX1, transfer it, reinstall Win2000 and your software, and restore your data. Or if you want to preserve everything, make a drive image with Ghost or some Ghostlike package.
posted by jfuller at 5:35 PM on December 27, 2005


If you are attempting to install this new hard drive as a replacement hard drive in your new system, you are having trouble with motherboard driver support. The hardware on the motherboard of the new system is different than the drivers installed on the old hard drive. The drivers aren't compatible and a blue screen is the result. I suspect this is the case.

This is called "Moving a Windows 2000 Installation to New Hardware" and here is the Microsoft knowledgebase article that describes the process.

For a similar, easier, and more risky repair (this is the one I would choose but I do this for a living), please see this article about How to perform an in-place upgrade of Windows 2000.

Good luck.
posted by Slap Incognito at 7:15 PM on December 27, 2005


Response by poster: OK, I'm backing up. Then I'll try something crazy if only to add to the common knowledge base.

Thanks to all. For now, I've been steered in this direction.

Question 2, in the unlikely event anyone cares, how crazy would it be to drop XP right over my 2000 platform and files, napalm-style?
posted by raider at 8:46 PM on December 27, 2005


Different chipsets?
posted by kenchie at 3:31 AM on December 28, 2005


raider: Do a backup first, but, it shouldn't cause a problem at all. Back in the day, OS installers were designed to be able to do just that. In fact, windows 98 and lower could be transported from motherboard to motherboard, and OS installs could be done on top of old OSs.

However, I like win2k just fine so I havn't upgraded in a long time.
posted by delmoi at 8:27 AM on December 28, 2005


« Older sharing outlook on a home network   |   How can I cash a third-party check? Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.