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BOOTUP PROB LEM

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by togi1

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I just upgraded a computer hard drive from 500 mb to 10 gb. I USED wESTERN dIGITAL SOFTWARE TO PARTITION AND FORMAT IT. The OS is Win. ME.

On bootup I get the message no boot record in floppy! The BIOS is set to boot from the hard disk first, not the floppy. It just keeps bypassing the hard disk.
Any ideas?

7 replies

by ð

have you try booting up with a dos boot disk and run fdisk and set the HD partition active? or try doing a fdisk /mbr?

by danpiers

The message you are getting means that the system did not find an active boot boot sector on your harddisk (and has been forced to look to the floppy.)
There are several possibilities that could be causing your problem. The first thing to check isthe CMOS Setup. Make sure that the 10GB harddisk is being recognized properly. I am concerned that your system is an older Pentium system that may not be capable of recognizing such a large harddisk. There were a lot of P-133 (and older) systems that could not use a hardisk with more that 4,096 cylinders. (It also worries me a bit that you HAD to partition and format with the WD software.) Was all the partitioning, formatting and installation of the software done on the harddisk while it was in this particular system? If the harddisk was partitioned, formatted, and loaded with Windows Me on a different system and the disk was then placed in this system, there may be an issue with your system recognizing a larger harddisk.
Also, makesure that your Western Digtal drive is set to MASTER (nor SINGLE) if you have it on a channel with a SLAVE CD-ROM. And, make sure that it is set to SINGLE (not MASTER) if it is alone on the channel. Western Digital drives are the exception when itcomes to jumper settings!
If the above is not relevent because your system has no problem recognizing the harddisk, then use FDISK to verify that the prinary partition (where Windows Me is installed) is set to ACTIVE.
If nothing seems to work for you, I would start over, but this I wouldn't use the WD software to initialize. I prefer to partition with the FDISK command, and format with the FORMAT command. Only resort to the EZ-BIOS software if it is truly needed. Good luck. Hope this has been helpful.

by togi1

What you are saying makes sense to me. I just don't understand why It finds the hard disk sometimes and not other times!

by masterp

I had the same problem with a western digital. I had to go into CMOS and enter in all of the hard drive specifics. I also booted with a win 98 startup and used fdisk to partition and format. This was easier than using the wd software.

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