Primary or Slave

Today i had a new hard drive installed at Best Buy. I formatted/partitioned it. Booted windows xp fron cdr and installed on drive. Now when i try to start computer i get an error that only says, "error loading OS_"

When i tried to reboot i pressed F1 and got the BIOS screen.
It has the drives listed as:

Primary [none]
Slave [wd120gb]
Secondary [cdrom/dvd combo]
secondary slave [cdrom]

Does this mean that they installed the new drive as a slave and this is the problem? Or did i goof it up installing windows?
Once i put the cdr in and it started i just followed the directions, really it only said take out disk 1 insert disk 2 etc.. everything seemed to install fine.

[swiftrhett]

change the jumper switch on the back of your physical hard drive to be "master"

[FouTight]

Thats really odd because drives don't come from teh factory set to slave, someone had to change that. I would make sure you didn't get a used drive or something and I would call them and complain, although I feel bad that you paid them to install it, it's realtively easy, if you are capable of installing windows, you can certainly install a HDD.

Thanks.

Originally they were supposed to install the new drive as the master and install the old drive as a slave. When i get there to pick it up they tell me there is no space for a second drive but i can get a HD enclosure and install the original drive as a slave.

There a few thing on there i want Pokertracker, PT databases etc.

So this is definately the problem? I want to be sure before i go back. Since i've already paid for it i'm going to make them fix it or give me my money back.

[CrazyN8]

How old is this computer?

Take the case off your computer.....find the HDD (it should be the one that doesn't exit the case (have an access point from outside the case).....look at the ribbon that connects it to the motherboard.

Is it about 3'' wide (IDE) or is it about 1/2'' wide (SATA)? If it is really wide all you need to do is find a spot on it to attach the other drive or get another IDE ribbon that has two spots on it for drives and attach the other drive. I can't imagine you not being able to add another drive. If it's SATA look on the motherboard where the other drive connects and see if there is a place for another cable like that to attach.

[CORed]

[ QUOTE ]
Thanks.

Originally they were supposed to install the new drive as the master and install the old drive as a slave. When i get there to pick it up they tell me there is no space for a second drive but i can get a HD enclosure and install the original drive as a slave.

There a few thing on there i want Pokertracker, PT databases etc.

So this is definately the problem? I want to be sure before i go back. Since i've already paid for it i'm going to make them fix it or give me my money back.

[/ QUOTE ]

Don't ever let them touch your computer again. They clearly have no idea what they are doing. Installing hardware on a computer is easy, if you have any elctrical-mechanical ability at all. Diagnosing problems can be a little harder, but you are much better off learning to do your own hardware upgrades than trusting idiots like the ones that couldn't even figure out how to install two hard drives and a DVD drive on the computer and then screwed up the master-slave setting on top of that.

It's about 2 1/2 years old. The original drive is a maxtor 160gb sata.

I really don't know anything about hardware. I guess it's time to educate myself. So much cheaper to do it yourself.

[ QUOTE ]

When i tried to reboot i pressed F1 and got the BIOS screen.
It has the drives listed as:

Primary [none]
Slave [wd120gb]
Secondary [cdrom/dvd combo]
secondary slave [cdrom]


[/ QUOTE ]

What size is the old drive and new drive? If the newly purchased drive is a 120GB Western Digital HD, it is set to be the slave drive and needs to be reset to master.

You can try simply changing the primary drive in the system BIOS to be wd120gb, but if it is jumped as a slave drive, this will not work.

Look at the back of the hard drive and you will see a small grid of pins next to the wide IDE cable (assuming you're computer is not new). Look for any jumpers that are connecting the pins (jumpers are inserted over two pins and control whether the drive is master, slave, etc.). Verify that they are set to make that drive a slave drive (Western Digitals usually have a sticker on top of the drive that shows jumper settings). If it is indeed set to slave, pull the jumpers out and set them to make the drive master. Restart the computer and enter BIOS to make sure the primary drive is wd120gb.

MisterW