hello my dad has a compaq presario desktop comp. he only had 40gb so we bought a new driver cuz there wasnt enough space on that one. So anyway I put the driver in another comp becuase I was havin abit of problems on his an ya I set up xp on is an everything ran smoothly on that comp. I put the hard drive into his comp an all the comp does is boot up an show compaq logo then after that it shows a black screen with just this
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flashing on an off.
what can the problem be? also tried connecting his old driver cuz I left it in an that works…things show up just when I put the new one in it wont load. I tryed changing boot order also so that it loads to the hard drive instead of the disc drive an nothin still.
problem is, you have 2 different machines. installing on one & transplanting to another doesn’t always work. For XP, you may have to do a repair ( don’t ask how, haven’t used windows in years ) by booting from the cd.Same goes for openSUSE
it was doing this before I installed it using the other comp also. I tryed installing the windows xp cd on the compaq first an it did the
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flashing thing an so I figured maybe if I install the driver an windows xp on other comp I can switch it back an it will run fine but its still doin the same thing.
I’ll trying switching boot order an try to reinstall it on the compaq but I doubt it will show up if its not doing it first and second time. I’m pretty sure I have the pin on master also.
How new is the compaq and how new is the other computer? The windows XP version you have may not support the compaq. You might need to create a slipstream windows XP install CD. Have you tried a linux livecd to see if that works?
Not sure if it’s the same problem, but the flashing dash screen after boot happened to me after I removed the second HD from a system without noticing that one of the boot code stages was written to it. I had to reinstall the bootloader (grub) with the Opensuse 11 DVD. No need to reinstall the system, didn’t loose any data.
the compaq had a windows xp on it on the other HD so I don’t see how its not working. Anyway even when I switched to the new HD and turned the comp on the flashing dash came up. So I couldn’t even load the windows xp cd at all.
The compaq was purchased in 2001 I think. I dunno how I’m suppose to install windows when the HD won’t even load in the first place. Thats why I switched it to the other computer because it showed up on there.
Maybe if I can put in a cd where I can set up a partition on the HD while its on the compaq I might be able to load the windows xp cd??
the other comp I got is abit older than that one but its from my work. They gave me a comp to use so I can practice on it.
I’m not sure I understand the situation. Let’s start from the beginning.
You are trying to add an additional drive to an existing computer. What is the make of the computer? Does the computer have any problem when you remove the new drive? Can you boot a linux liveCD when the new drive is removed? Does all the hardware work?
If the computer is old enough, the hard drives may need to have the jumper settings adjusted to ‘master’ or ‘slave’ manually. The ide cables may need to be unidirectional as well with one end for the motherboard ide controller and the other for the drive.
The BIOS may need to be adjusted to select the boot drive.
The Windows XP that you installed on the drive using a different computer is unlikely to work unless both computers have similar components.
Try uninstalling the old drive and replacing with the new. Then ,if that works, you can migrate settings and files over from the old.
ok I bought a new harddrive an I’m trying to replace the old one with the new one. When I conntect the old one it works but when I just put the new one on by itself it just shows the flashing dash. I put it to master also, everything seems to be working fine but when I try setting up my new hard drive nothing happens. I don’t know why the old hard drive is able to load.
Have you installed an operating system on the new hard drive? The old one has windows installed as an operating system, the new one won’t have anything installed out of the box. You need to boot with some install media, ie CD, DVD, USB, floppy. Then install an operating system.
Usually a flashing dash is accompanied by a message saying that no operating system was detected. I would guess mbr needs to be fixed if there is an operating system installed. Windows would need to be installed on the same system the hard drive is going to be used on. OpenSuse and other Linux distributions could be installed on a different machine and transferred with a little care, something I don’t recommend unless you have more experience.
ya thats the thing, I have the cd in there an I’ve set the setting to boot from cd rom drive or dvd what ever. anyway I set it up an ya it wont load the OS so I can install it. an nothing but a black screen with the flashing dash appears, theres no message at all.
You simply mess up systems. If the system is not booting from the CD/DVD drive (without the ‘r’), 99,99% chance that there’s something wrong with how the disk was built in.
And: yes you can exchange disks between machines. But not Windows bootable disks. They are built up machine dependant. That’s why XP wants you to reactivate even if you’ve just bought a simple cardreader.
Are you certain there is a DVD drive? You may have physically disconnected the cables while moving drives around. Also, if you are using DVD media that will not work if you only have a CD drive. Look at the drive for a label with DVD on there. Finally, are you certain that the CD/DVD is good? Does it boot on a different machine? What OS are you trying to load?
hello yes, I bought a dvd drive an its brand new because the windows xp cd I have is dvd. I have disconnected the cd drive an replaced it with the dvd drive. When I connect the dvd drive and hard drive to the other comp everything loads and works fine. When I first tryed it on the computer I’m trying to fix, nothing loads I just get a black screen with a flashing dash.
I still get the same problem even when I loaded everything from the other computer and switched it over to this one.
when I connect my old drive and put the dvd in, that also works and loads for the old hard drive. So I know my dvd drive is working.
maybe I’ll try doing it all over again. I’ll erase the new hard drive and put it back into the comp and see what happens.