I'm taking a hard drive out of PC 1 and putting it in PC 2. Now I
figured it would boot up, and ask for drivers for the new hardware, but
no such luck.

HD has Win98SE installed, with all latest patches and updates. It was
obtained from an OEM and is an HP Brio. model # is D9666T. Note the 3
identical digits in a row, ahhh, it's an evil computer.

Installed it into the new Microtel non-OS pc. Turned it on and it gives
me an Invalid boot partition error. Hit any key to load Operating
system. Then I'm basically in a loop because it keeps telling me to hit
any key, then says invalid boot partition, yadda yadda yadda.
Did fdisk /status, it didn't tell me anything about the C drive.
I can see the files on c:. I can even get on it and execute some
commands, like dir.

The new pc doesn't have a floppy.
I was able to boot using the win98 cdrom, but only to dos mode.
The hard drive is bootable, it was the only HD in the old pc.
In fact, when I couldn't get it to boot in the new machine, I put it
back in the old and it's fine.

If I boot from Win98 CD, boot from cdrom and boot to dos with cdrom
support, I can see the C: drive. If I boot from cdrom and run windows
setup, it gets past scandisk, then into the system detection, but fails
with an error about there being no valid partition. So it won't even let
me reinstall windows, which I was hoping not to do anyway.

So HP has a bunch of crap on the pc, including its own boot manager.
Could that be what is fouling things up? How can I disable it?
I've been told to try fdisk /mbr but that it could be a cure or just add
to the problem if it goes wrong.

Has anyone ever just moved a HD from one PC to another and not have to
do anything more than update the drivers for the new motherboard, etc.?

thanks,
keith

--

************************************************** ***

"On second thought, let's not go to Camelot.
It is a silly place."

http://www.justanotherwebsite.com

Put the drive back in the old box and then go into the BIOS and see what
the drive parameters are that it is using. Set the new box the same when
you put the drive in it. If still no luck then fdisk/mbr and then sys
c:. That should do it. You may have to borrow the floppy drive from the
old box to do this.

Keith wrote:
>
> I'm taking a hard drive out of PC 1 and putting it in PC 2. Now I
> figured it would boot up, and ask for drivers for the new hardware, but
> no such luck.
>
> HD has Win98SE installed, with all latest patches and updates. It was
> obtained from an OEM and is an HP Brio. model # is D9666T. Note the 3
> identical digits in a row, ahhh, it's an evil computer.
>
> Installed it into the new Microtel non-OS pc. Turned it on and it gives
> me an Invalid boot partition error. Hit any key to load Operating
> system. Then I'm basically in a loop because it keeps telling me to hit
> any key, then says invalid boot partition, yadda yadda yadda.
> Did fdisk /status, it didn't tell me anything about the C drive.
> I can see the files on c:. I can even get on it and execute some
> commands, like dir.
>
> The new pc doesn't have a floppy.
> I was able to boot using the win98 cdrom, but only to dos mode.
> The hard drive is bootable, it was the only HD in the old pc.
> In fact, when I couldn't get it to boot in the new machine, I put it
> back in the old and it's fine.
>
> If I boot from Win98 CD, boot from cdrom and boot to dos with cdrom
> support, I can see the C: drive. If I boot from cdrom and run windows
> setup, it gets past scandisk, then into the system detection, but fails
> with an error about there being no valid partition. So it won't even let
> me reinstall windows, which I was hoping not to do anyway.
>
> So HP has a bunch of crap on the pc, including its own boot manager.
> Could that be what is fouling things up? How can I disable it?
> I've been told to try fdisk /mbr but that it could be a cure or just add
> to the problem if it goes wrong.
>
> Has anyone ever just moved a HD from one PC to another and not have to
> do anything more than update the drivers for the new motherboard, etc.?
>
> thanks,
> keith
>
> --
>
> ************************************************** ***
>
> "On second thought, let's not go to Camelot.
> It is a silly place."
>
> http://www.justanotherwebsite.com