Secondary H.D.D. prevents boot past bios.

[canem]

Hi everyone!
Not an I.T. specialist, but I'm pretty practical.
Wife's grandmother has had multiple issues with her operating system so I was asked to fix it. I couldn't repair the operating system (Windows XP) so I purchased a new 500gb h.d.d. and wrote her operating system to it. I realized her psu was only 350 watts, so I threw in a 600 while I was at it.
Booted the P.C. and installed all updates, browser, etc. After that, turned off the P.C. and plugged in the old h.d.d. so I could extract all her documents to the new one. Here's where the problem is. The computer will boot bios, show me both the hard drives(Which I put the new one as the primary) Gets to the windows flag, and immediate black screen. Non responsive.

If anyone has an idea please throw it my way. Thanks!

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Buy a third-party hard drive enclosure and put the original drive in to it.
But don't connect it to the computer just yet.

Restart Windows and allow time for it fully load and settle down.
Now plug the enclosure in to a USB port and see if it's readable.

If it isn't, test it with SeaTools for Windows (can test any make of drive): http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/support/downloads/item/seatools-win-master/

If the drive fails the long/extended test, that is probably why Windows can't start when the system is started up with the drive already attached.

 

[HiTechObsessed]

If you just need to pull the documents off, you don't need to boot to it. Just boot to your normal HDD and pull the files from there.

 

[Paperdoc]

A couple ideas:

1. As HiTechObsessed hinted, ensure in BIOS Setup that this machine will boot only from the new HDD, and will NOT ever try to boot from the old HDD.

2. The old HDD has Win XP installed on it. I'm not clear whether you re-Installed XP again to the new HDD, or used another version of Win. However, one wrinkle in using XP is that no version of it has built-in drivers for AHCI devices (native mode of SATA drives), so technically you were supposed to install the required driver for that from a floppy drive during the Install process. BUT many BIOS's have a work-around for you to eliminate that step. In BIOS Setup where you configure the SATA ports (I am assuming that all these drives are SATA), nearby there is a line for SATA Port Mode. It has choices like "IDE (or PATA) Emulation", "Native SATA", "ACHI" and "RAID". To use XP without the AHCI drivers specially installed, you need to set that option to "IDE (or PATA) Emulation". Then the BIOS intervenes and makes the actual SATA HDD appear to be a simpler IDE unit, and Win XP is happy to deal with that. Try setting your BIOS that way and see if Windows can access both drives.

Remember, if you change any setting in BIOS Setup, you must use the SAVE and EXIT step.

 

[canem]

Thanks Paperdoc! That actually worked first try. Really appreciate it man.

 

[Paperdoc]

Hooray, glad it's working for you.