HDD and BIOS Recognition ?

[tapar1]

I have a Dell Dimension 4600 and I have just installed a new hard drive (old hdd dying) and placed the OS (XP Pro) on that drive... the new drive has been formatted and shows up as Drive F:... when I go into the BIOS to select this drive as the start up drive, I only have a choice of Drive C: for the start up boot drive... the BIOS does show the new hdd and the system does start up properly... however, I need to see if I can recover data from my old hdd partitioned as C: and if I connect the old C: drive up, the system tries to boot off of the old C: drive (old hdd has bad sectors that does not allow the OS to launch - blue screen on start up)... is there any way to get the BIOS to boot off of F: and ignore C:... if I unplug the old hdd and my external hdd, will the new hdd with the OS on it be recognized as C:... any help appreciated... thanks.

 

[tapar1]

after some further google searching on the topic, it appears the easiest thing to do is to unplug my old hdd and external hdd and wipe the new hdd clean and start all over again...

 

[serpent1202]

Yes. Just unplug the old HD and your external, plug in the new HD and connect it to your IDE 1 slot. Make sure the drive is set to master and change the jumper on the back on the previous hard drive over to slave. Connect the old HD either with the same cable so it's also connected to IDE 1 or connect it straight to the other IDE slot. Once the computer posts, you should have an option as to what xp to boot, the top 1 will be the master.

Then once in windows you should be able to just tranfer your files over to the new drive and get rid of the old one.

 

[tapar1]

thanks for the info... one question, I have a cable select ribbon in my system I believe... the original hdd was set to cable select and the connector pins are labeled DRIVE 0 (I think this is at the end of the ribbon) and DRIVE 1 (think this is mid ribbon)... can I still change the jumpers to master and slave with this cable?

 

[serpent1202]

Yes you can.

 

[tapar1]

great... I'll make the changes tonight... thanks for your help _1202.