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EMachine HArd Drive Swap

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5 replies

by gmichaels

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I have been trying to swap a hard drive form a pentium based 133mhz system into an EMachine ETower 433mhz system. When I try to boot the EMachine with the drive all I get is an "invalid system disk" error. I know the drive is a good bootable drive and it boots just fine in its original 133mhz machine. I tried using auto detect in the CMOS as well as USER defined. I checked the settings in the 133mhz machines CMOS and made sure the EMachine CMOS matched. The drive is recognized by the CMOS and my boot messages indicate it found a bootable drive on the primary IDE master. I even tried clearing the CMOS with the jumpers, loading defaults and optimal settings in th CMOS. So does anyone have any other good ideas why it will not boot off the drive? Its a win98 OS fat32 formatted drive 6.4mb. It was formatted into three 2GB logical drives as that is all the 133mhz system bios supported at the time. Should I just wipe the drive and reformat on the EMachine? I was hoping to preserve what was on the drive.

5 replies

by ann777

You are better off installing the older drive as a Drive D and booting off the 433 MHz system with it's drive, then copying the data off it to your Drive C 433MHz machine, and formatting (maybe even fdisking and reparitionning).

Another alternative may be to boot from the floppy and offload what you need from the drive onto another network drive or another hdd.

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You might want to try setting the jumper to cable select and see if the hdd will be recognized that way. (I recently opened some older HP Tower computers that needed to be used for testing purposes. I removed the hdds and formatted them in another machine fine, but they would not work in the original machine until the jumpers were set from m to cs ???)

by thechas

You say the drive is formatted as 3 2GB logical drives?

That may be the problem right there.

The E-Machine's BIOS may require that the boot partition be the primary DOS partition, set as active.

The drive may also have a 'drive overlay' program installed that does not 'get along' with the newer BIOS on the E-Machine.

Check with the drive manufacture for an updated version of their drive installation software.

Installing the newest version of the drive overlay software may correctyour boot problem.
Or, there may be a specific recommended setting for the drive in BIOS settings when using the overlay software.

Chas

by gmichaels

I think I'm just going to go ahead and wipe the drive. Its will be a cleaner system in the end. I thought most overlay software was to get beyond the 2GB limitation. But that may have been a factor. Better to just backup and then wipe the drive.

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