On 19 Sep 2005 at 21:18, Justin wrote:

> I think maybe the hard drive is bad, so I take out the "bad" hard
> drive and put the second one in its place, correctly switching the
> jumpers and cables. Now I have the same problem, except after I
> formated and tried to install windows, I got the problem "Error
> Loading Operating System", or something along those lines.

  I've only recently encountered a BIOS that detects all drives from scratch
on every boot.  On previous BIOSes, the detection process has been much
slower, and so it has been normal to detect once and let the BIOS save the
details for use on subsequent boots.

  So I'm thinking that when you swapped out the old first drive, you may not
have had the BIOS detect the geometry of what had been the second drive --
it may have tried to use the geometry data from the first drive to do this
format and install onto the second drive.  Since they were from different
manufacturers, there's a good chance that they weren't an exact match.

  If this is the case, you can *probably* re-detect the good drive and re-do
the format and install....

David Gillett

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