Hi

Don't know if this is correct forum but here goes:

It's got to the time where I need to do this and I have done it numerous times in the past but this time I am having problems.

Last week bought two new 500gb harddrives and replaced my existing 300gb slave. Formatted and partitioned the new 500gb and set up as slave - all okay.

Today I have removed the 300gb master and installed, formatted and partitioned the new 500gb hd with PM8.

I have set the primary partition as active and all the others are logical which is as the old primary hd was partitioned.

I have been geting a disk boot failure error on trying to boot from the CDROM with the XP installation disk. Having originally had the bios set incorrectly I have now rechecked it and ensured the boot order is set to CDROM, HD-0 and the floppy.

I have ensured that the primary hd has been detected, detection is set to to Auto and Access Mode to LBA following the Seagate instructions. I have now also disconnected the secondary drive to exclude that from the picture until I get into the primary drive.

I have also reset the jumper on the new primary to Master having disconnected the secondary drive.

I am at a loss to know what is wrong. Could anyone give me any ideas?

Info on partitioning layout:
Primary drive
C boot FAT32 3.5 gb
D System1 NTFS 20GB
E System2 NTFS 3.5GB (used only for swapping so as to be able to sector copy sys1 and possibly as disaster recovery option)
F Applications NTFS 5GB
G Data NTFS 437 GB or thereabouts
H Encrypted partition NTFS 2Gb

I Pagefile NTFS 4Gb
J CopyData NTFS 440Gb
K System Images NTFS 20Gb (used to store Hyperos sector images of System 1)
L Encrypted Partition NTFS 2Gb

I am just trying to recreate this layout which I had on the two 300gb hds with a less space for data of course.

I have the second 500gb hard drive in place with the above layout. Now I have come to do what I have done numerous times before and am encountering this invalid system disk error as detailed above.

It's not the DVDROM which boots PM
It's not the XP disk which enters setup from windows on my laptop.
I have partitioned the primary hard drive in just the same way as the secondary (with PM) except that C is set as a primary, active partition.

I think there is something else going on here. Does the MBR come into this scenario? Lately stuff has been happening to make me think I needed to do a complete reinstall and one of the things that I think what has been happening is BIOS not responding to changes in the boot order. Prior to this reinstallation I was trying to set the bootorder back to HD1, CDROM, Floppy and the BIOS appeared to take it but then didn't behave that way, still showing a boot from CD in the post.

Is the MBR held in BIOS? Could it be the problem? Do you think I might be on the right track?

Some further information.

I have just deleted all the partitions I had created with PM.
Then I disabled all boot devices other than the DVDROM
I have created a bootable disc using the seagate discwizard iso file (for dos)

What is happening now is that discwizard boots but leaves me at the A:/> command prompt.

I am confused by this having disabled all boot devices other than DVDROM so I would have thought that I wouldn't get an A prompt. Or is that normal?

reseat your ram, like actually pull them out, put them back in pushing each side down hard close to the clips, if that does not work, ...change mainboard

sometimes, the connector for the ram have a bad contact, (resistive), depending which pins can do strange things, also capacitors on mainboard go...these are most common problems..good chance reseating ram will fix your problems..all the best

From my experience, if you get the following error message: (or similar)

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:

\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\PCI.SYS

----------------------------------------------------------------------


Then there's an excellent chance that reseating the RAM will solve the problem.

That solved the problem on a Gateway PIII 500.

Similar problem for me recently as you have, setting HDD1 as boot but it won't, then set CDROM as boot and it won't. I bridged the jumper on the mainboard battery to blank the bios, worked for a while, but started again, later I find out one of my USB HDDs is leaking 5 volts back into the computer, what it was doing I don't know, but after disconnecting it the computer works as it should.

when you try to install windows do you get this error when the cdrom
drive boots up and when its going to install windows.

what could be happening is that one of the ddrams is at fault.
that why its coming up with error.

allso to point out that when installing windows xp
its straight forward install and no errors should come up

if so there is two reasons for this

1)the ddram is at fault

2)the ram on the hard drive is at fault

It does seem to indicate memory as the fault. Had the same happen three weeks ago, with a new 1gb stick.

for sure it be a ddram fault