![]() I double checked to make sure the boot.ini was there, and the ntldr and all those fun files.they're all there. I put the 300gb into my USB drive enclosure, and it popped up, all the data intact, the windows directory instact. I shut the comp down and threw the 80gb back in. Nothing happens after as long as 20 minutes. It just sits there and sits there, no hard drive activity, nothing. In the upper left hand corner there was a blinking cursor (the kind that's usually there for a couple seconds before the Windows screen pops up). I exited without changing anything, and after the bios loaded, the computer just SAT THERE. Finally I swapped the 300gb back in.went into the bios to make sure everything was okay, and they still detected the 300gb drive. I checked the cables, the jumpers, nothing seemed to work. However.tonight I swapped in the 80gb drive and got some beeps and an "unable to detect hard drive 0" error mesg. This also has been working fine for the last couple weeks. So I have just been turning the computer off, and swapping the 300gb drive with the 80gb drive with my original OS install on it. There was one program that I hadn't found the install disks for that I have to use occasionally for work. I've been using the 300gb disk without problems for a couple weeks. I booted to the XP Pro SP2 disc again, and then told it to install windows on the existing partition. When it examined the partition, it found all sorts of errors, which I instructed it to fix by reformatting the drive completely. So I booted to a Symantec Parition Magic disk instead. And this time when it went to boot up it said "DISK READ ERROR, CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart" That got me thinking about whether the XP Pro SP2 disc was having trouble formatting the drive. After disabling that stupid thing, I rebooted, checked the bios, sure enough, it detected the drive just fine, 300gb, no problems. ![]() My comp HAD been trying to load the Intel Boot Agent about the time it would stop, so I uninstalled that using the Boot Agent command prompt software that I downloaded from Intel. (yes, the boot order was Floppy->Hard Disk->CD Rom, so that's not the issue). Every time it went to boot to the newly installed Windows XP, it would load the bios and then just stop. That said.I booted to my Windows XP Professional SP2 disc, and let it format the disc and install windows. Sure enough, after installing the drive and going into the bios, it detected a 300gb Hard Drive with no apparent problems. I'm not sure exactly what sort of MB it's packing, but someone over on the Dell forums said that with the latest bios it shouldn't matter what size the drive is. I decided to make this into a boot drive. I've run up an oddball problem that is stretching my sanity awfully thin.
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