I have just reinstalled XP Pro. I have a SATA hard drive and have to install drivers during install. I didn't install the drivers this time assuming they would still be in the system. Ever since XP thinks the hard drive is a removable drive. I tried reinstalling again but nothing.
I turned the PC off to reboot when I though I was going into safe mode and went into regular mode instead. Now, it thinks one of my external drives is the C drive. On boot, I am getting a message that it cannot recognize find the system 32 windows config file (I'm paraphrasing).
I used the repair utility to get to the C prompt (which is pointed at the external drive) and checked the drive letters. I don't think the PC bios knows the hard drive is there.
I tried going into setup and reverting to factory installed configuration and that didn't change anything. I could not get it to recognize the hard drive.
I would like to use several removable hard drive bays on several PCs.Then have a hard drive with XP on it and take it with me to each machine as I need to. It does not need to hot-swap and I doubt I am breaching the Microsoft EULA because I could only use it on one PC at a time.I believe that the activation is based on points gathered from the items installed in each PC it is installed on and they would differ from PC to PC. Especially things like the NIC with it's own MAC address.
(*Get some free giggles out of M$'s definitions for a "system" and "boot" partition. Hint: the partition that is used to boot your machine is NOT called "boot", and the partition that holds your operating system is NOT called "system". http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314470)
more precisely, what leads XP to decide what is removable and what isn't? Example: System 1 is a P4 built in a Shuttle SFF case with the provided MB; 1 SATA hard disk with three partitions, 1 DVD-ROM on PATA, 1 floppy on floppy channel, 1 multi-format flash reader on USB; the system sees two of the flash slots as removable storage. System 2 is an Athlon 64 built on an Epox Nvidia+ MB. 1 SATA hard disk (with two partitions), 1 SATA DVD-ROM (using a bridge adapter), 4 hard disks on PATA, 1 floppy on floppy channel, 1 multi-format flash reader on USB; the system sees _both_ SATA drives as being removable along with two of the flash slots. Either system properly sees an external hard disk on USB or Firewire as being removable.
Just want to upgrade from an 80 gig hard drive to something in the 250-500 gig range, and I would like to clone my existing drive with operating system directly to the new drive. Is it possible with freeware? I'll then format the old drive and use it as the slave.
I have a computer used for weekly backups that will utilize a removable hard drive that gets swapped out every week for offsite storage. In this case, I will have two of these removable hard drives, only one of which will be in use at any time, swapping in and out with each other every week.Since these hard drives will also contain the OS, how do I deal with XP licensing and authentication? Since there's only *one* computer, can I install and authorize a single copy of XP (Pro) on both removable hard drives? It seems unfair I would have to buy two copies of XP if only one is going to be used on the single computer at any given time.
Last Tuesday when I turned my computer on, I got the message ?A disk read error occurred, press crtrl+alt+delete to restart?. Since then I have been searching online for a way to get my computer back up & running.The specs of my computer:Dell Inspiron 9100 NotebookWindows XP Pro SP3P4 @ 3.2 Ghz w/ Hyper Threading1 gb Memory 160 gb Western Digital PATA/IDE HD (Replaced original 80 gb HD in May 08 b/c too small Removable internal DVD/CD-RW drive (& a removable internal floppy dis Purchased in Oct. 04.)
All of a sudden my PC isn't finding a removable drive when i plug my camera into the USB port. I'm trying to copy pics from my digital camera and have always used the removable drive function in My Computer...now it's not working. other USB hardware (keyboard, mouse etc) are working fine. I've changed the cable, installed the camera driver disk, tried finding new hardware, and tried different USB ports to no avail.Camera is an Episilom 1.3 digital dreams and is working fine. Running Win XP SP2 on AMD Semprom 2800+ 2 GHz processor. Mobo is ASRock K7Upgrade-600
I have a Dell computer where one of the loading .dll files came up 'missing' one day, so it won't boot. I want to get all the photos and other docs off the hard drive. I had downloaded one version of linux and was able to see the files on the internal hard drive, but was unable to copy them to a memory stick or external hard drive. Now I've downloaded ubuntu and booted off a memory stick... this time, it's telling me that the internal hard drive has all kinds of bad sectors and won't let me access any of the files on there.
My laptop died and I removed the hard drive.i hooked the hard drive up to my new laptop via a SATA/IDE cable.
I can see the old hard drive in the E drive and it appears that all the contents are there by the size of the hard drive (same as when I had it in the old laptop) but I can only see, actually view, a very small percentage of the drive.
My goal: I want to transfer all old music, word documents and photos from old laptop into new laptop.
current HD going bad, have second HD installed and using as back but now i need to make the second HD my primary, can i do this without having to reformat in order to add booting files.
using XP. am having wild swings in my hard drive space go from 46.1 to 44.1 and sometimes in between. have not installed any new programs recently. what could be causing it and how do i correct also am noticing my laptop as slowed appreciablydo know whether the two problems are correlated
i have a Compaq nx 7400 .i was hahving a lot of problems with the computer so i decided to put a new hard drive in and reinstall XP . well i have the new hard drive in and started up the machine and changed the bott options to run from the dvd and all went fine until i should press the ENTER ( return ) button to install XP now . as soon as i did that the next window said no hard drive found . this was also happening on the old hard drive that was in the machine .
When installing a larger main drive, how do I get the drivers copied onto the slave before I take out the main one I wonder is there a simple way of doing this, I am using Windows XP home edition, the PC is an oldish one and isn't any specific make, so I can't get any clever programs from the manufacturers site
I use Cobian Backup to produce a zip-file containing all files and folders, except for temporary-folders (I added an exclude-filter), of my system.Before I can rely on this method, I need to find a way of restoring the 27 gb zip-file, which I store on a networked drive, easily. how booting up a laptop with a formatted harddrive, be able to access a network-drive and extract all the contents of the networked zip-file to the hard drive?
A little over a year ago I purchased a used IBM Thinkpad laptop from ebay for my wife. It came with Windows 2000 Professional installed and everything worked fine. No CDs or floppies came with the computer. A couple of months later, it was stolen by one of her business associates. It eventually was recovered, but the thief had installed Windows XP along with the OS that was already installed. In trying to remove XP and return the machine to its original state, I somehow managed to eventually not be able to use either OS. As it stands now I have no OS and cannot even access my hard drive.When I boot from a floppy then try to change to C: drive, I get the error message: Invalid media type reading drive c: Abort, Retry, Fail?
A friend gave me a laptop, my problem is that it came from Japan thus everything is japanase thus I can't hardly use it. The reason I accept it is bcoz he said I can try to reinstall a win xp with english version (btw, the OS is win xp pro in japanase version). Thus I bought win xp pro sp2 and try to reinstall it, so I reboot fm cd rom and while the windows setup is starting, the system stopped and the message on my screen read as:A problem has been detected and windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer.If this is the first time you've seen this error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again follow these steps:Check for viruses on your computer, resume any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers, check your hard drive to make sure it is porperly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK/F to check hard drive corruption. then restart computer. how in the world I can follow the above steps if everything written on it are in japanase language? I also try to visit the manufacture's website, thinking that perhaps it help solve the problem but....i also need a japanase translator to understand it.
I have an HP pavillion xf328 laptop and of late it refuses to boot.I could not sart it in safe mode or any of the other choices offered at stert-up. I finally got tire of it just repeatedly cycling through the first part of the boot cycle so I got out my power max floppy and reformatted the HD. Then I reinstalled XP pro. It worked fine for several start-ups and now just goes to a blue screen. Is hp somehow proprietary on how I have to 'restore' the system?
I had to reinstall XP because of spyware issues. I saved important data on my slave drive. I reinstalled XP. Now the bios, device manager, and disk manager recognizes the slave drive but didn't assign it a drive letter. In disk manager it shows as a basic disk, NTFS, Healthy (Active), 18.65 GB,Online. When I right click the volume to assign a drive letter it is grayed out.
i screwed up my registry, and of all things it was the keyboard driver or something, so theres no hope of fixing it on my computer. ive got the drive hooked up as the slave on a different computer, but i cant figure out how to edit the registry on my drive rather than the primary drive. is there any editors that will open it from a file? any way of decompiling it? theres got to be some way to edit it. also, they are both xp.
I have just bought and installed (to the point of completing initialization under Disk Management) a new 1 TB hard drive. Originally, I was planning to use it solely for data storage.However, I am thinking of installing Windows XP Pro and all the programs I currently use on it, thereby making it the new OS and programs drive, while using the original 120 GB HD as a data/backup drive.I think the main appeal of doing this, for me, is that it also presents an opportunity to reinstall Windows on a machine which hasn't had this done for more than three years, and which currently seems to take at least five minutes to boot to a "usable" state, despite having a reasonably high spec for its age (it was bought in 2001, but as a result of the upgrade
I have 69.1 memory free from 74.5 and i noticed no matter how much i delete i cant get up into the 70s.For example this month i have deleted a ton of music files that came up to about 400mb,Then a few programs that were around 50mb each and still nothing .If anything it seems i am going down in memory instead of gaining from deleting these programs.
I had this idea, see if anybody has an opinion about this. My wife has an old XP computer I want to buy her a new one but she doesn't like the vista and she wants to keep the old xp operating system. What I want to do is take the old hard drive and put it in the new computer as the master and take the new hard drive and put it in as the slave erasing the vista off it. Then using the master slave way can I transfer the xp operating system and all her files and data from the old hard drive to the new one.
I'm connecting a 30GB Travelstar Hard Drive via an external USB 2.0 case to my Thinkpad T40 with Windows XP (pro). Windows immediately recognized it. However, the hard drive does not show up under Windows Explorer. I can go into Device Manager, click on Disk Drives, and it does show the new drive there (along with my main hard drive, which is a 80 GB hard drive).
I cannot figure out how to make it show up in Windows Explorer with an Drive Letter assigned to it and thus, how to actually use it.
Without going into too much detail. My hard drive has XP O/S on it. All I want to do is to format it. NTFS. So I have a clean hard drive with no operating system on it. How can I do it?
Windows XP, that is. Well, if I am not completely mistaken, hard drives do not need any drivers to work. Right? I mean, I bought a new HDD (Samsung HD753LJ) and I can see it, use it and all... But Windows STILL asks me to install it (you know, the "new device found"-thing) every time I restart my PC. I've told it to "don't ask to install this device again"
I have an 8 month old Dell xp system and have just caught something nasty. I cant do a sytem restore, dl/run any software tools, and its so slow that the system is pretty much useless. Dell says that they think it is spyware and they can fix me right up for just $49.95. I think I have everything I need backed up, so I was thinking about wiping my hard drive and starting over for free. Could someone walk me through it? Then, could someone point me in the right direction to keep this from happening again.
Per "My Computer", the drives are: C:= 200 gig, File: system NTSF. D:= 8.5gig (A partition on the C Drive, it contains HP_Recovery), File: system FAT32. E:= LightScribe DVD/CD Burner/Player, F:= My "Back-up" HD, 160 gig, Seagate Ultra ATA/100, File: system NTSF. G, H, I & J are available for future use.
I backed up all my files etc. from my old PC (Windows Me upgraded to XP) onto the 160 gig HD. The "Back-up" HD was the slave in my old PC. It contains Files etc. there is no Operating System on it.
After installing the "Back-up" HD in the new PC I get an "Error loading OS" message when I boot-up. If I turn off the PC, wait 60 seconds and then turn it on it loads OK and yes I can access the 2nd HD, copy files and paste them into the new 200 gig HD etc.