Michael Scott

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Joined
Dec 31, 2010
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I recently bought a new PC (Intel Core2 Quad, 6GB ram, Sata with 300GB HDD) and installed a new (OEM) version of Windows 7 Home Premium (64bit)
Everything was running fine until I decided I'd physically add the old 'primary' drive from my old Pentium 3 as a secondary/backup. It's only 120GB so not really large enough for "proper" backup, but I thought it would be useful for photo/music storage AND give me the added advantage of not having to copy all these files via CD, Easy Transfer or whatever.

Since the old drive is IDE and the new mobo is SATA, I bought an adaptor and plugged everything in. Things ran OK for about 2 or 3 restarts, then the crap hit the fan. I've had to disconnect the IDE drive in order to be able to boot win7. I think the copy of WinXP Pro on the old drive trashed portions of my Win7 boot record, because I no longer even see a BIOS prompt when booting the new PC, which means I have no access to any "repair tools".......that is, if there even ARE repair tools on an OEM copy of win7 (I don't think there are!)

The computer WILL boot into win7, but there's still some strange stuff going on. I need to do a repair of some sort (probably just a complete re-installation).

In the meantime, I'm wondering, if I get any new stuff safely off the computer, do a clean install of Win7 and THEN try again to add the second (IDE with adaptor) drive, is there some way to prevent (with jumpers or install procedure or whatever) the old drive from screwing up my new OS before I get in there and delete XP from it? Plus, is there a standard jumper setting for the old drive.....or are they all different, depending on brand, etc?

Thanks for any tips/tricks/suggestions.
(P.S. Drives are so cheap nowdays, I'm thinking maybe I should just forget the old one, but my conscience and to some degree my wallet tells me to make this work!)
 


Solution
Hi Michael,
I presume you have a OEM disk? If so, reconnect your old drive and then pop your disk in and boot off that. You can then use the install feature to reformat the old drive as well as repairing your original installation.
Check the back of the IDE drive for Jumpers and make sure it's in the 'slave' position. There should be a diagramme there-abouts to show you the correct position.
to be fair 100mb of slack is nothing, hardly worth the hassle to reclaim. Glad you finally have a working PC anyhoo...

It's not the 100MB (factory/stock) partition I'd be worried about.......it's the 10GB I increased it to when I was attempting to repartition and make a spot large enough to reinstall Win7 without having to reformat. When the shop got things back up and running.....Easeus immediately kicked in and resumed the 'expansion' job I had been attempting two days ago.....around the time everything hit the fan.

So what I'm wondering now is whether it's worth the "risk" of attempting to resize that 10 GIG partition back to the 100 MEG size that it originally was......now that I don't need to reinstall Windows after all.

Agreed that 100MB would be nothing.......but at 10GB, we're talking genuine real estate. :-)
 


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