This is a complicated question and I will try to get it right. Background: My old hard drive was acting up-rebooting over and over again. My COMPUTER was a few years old so I decided to buy a new computer and then take my old hard drive out of the old computer, put it in the new computer as a slave, and then retrieve all of my important data from the old one simply by copying to the new computer's hard drive. I would then reformat the old drive and use it for storage, etc. I got the new computer, an HP with XP pro, a dvd burner, media slots, usb 2, IEEE 1394, and a 150 gb hard drive. It works fine. I tried to put the old hard drive in the computer jumpered as a slave and in the slave position on the cable with the DVD as master. when I try to boot the computer it goes to my old drive first to look for an operating system and starts rebooting over and over again as it did before when I had the drive in my old computer. I tried putting the drive on a seperate flat cable as slave but it was looked at first for a system there too. I have verified that the jumper is in the right place on the drive but it won't ACT as a slave. the computer keeps going to it for a system before going to the good hard drive in the new computer. What am I doing wrong? How can I make my old drive into a second drive without erasing it and losing all my data?Is the hard drive in the new computer a SATA drive?

Run EVEREST Home and post the report you can run so we will know detrails about all of the hardware. That is the best way to get an intelligent response.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4181.htmlSet the boot order right, I think you're trying to boot off your old HDD now even THOUGH it's set to slave.

Setting the boot order can be done in the BIOS. The drive is acting a slave that merely means that it is waiting for the master to send it's signals first. But if the Master isn't allowed to boot from, then the slave will be allowed to boot from first. No oddities there.Have you checked the jumper settings on the master HDD ? ?

patio. 8-)Thanks for the quick responses. The hard drive on the new computer is an SATA (the KIND with the small wires right?) I had read somewhere else about changing the boot order in the BIOS, and I can get to the bios by pressing F1 --"to enter setup press F1". And I do see the old and new hard drives listed in the bios. But I don't know how to set them to a new boot order. How do I do that?
Thanks



































Depends on the BIOS you're using. I suggest you refer to the mainboard manual because each BIOS is different.

What's with the smiley on the bottom?It's at the end of the wasted space....

patio. 8-)