Swapping Hard Drives and....

tonebone22

So I am getting rid of about 10 old computers and I wanted to go through and see what was on the hard drives before I got rid of them. I set an old Gateway up and have been plugging in each drive one at a time. Got a few to work and I am stuck on a BigFoot hard-drive. The POST goes ok and one beep sounds alerting all is well in BIOS... Then it cgets stuck on a black screen with the one " _ " that flashes and all I can do is ALT+CNTRL+DLT to reset the computer... any ideaS?

bloodwynd

It depends, but normally if you just get a cursor or "_" after a successful POST it might indicate any one of the following:
1. Bad Sectors on the HDD are preventing the system to boot up
2. There might be a problem with the OS installed, and that its not continuing to boot up phase of the OS, either corrupted registry or OS
3. HDD might already be bad
4. Haven't experienced this yet, but MBR(master boot record) might be corrupted or have been modified

Albin

Why dont you try to connect those HDD as slaves to a PC and go through it.

__________________
_______________
Cheers,
Albin

"We are all either fools or undiscovered geniuses."

tonebone22

****First try booting it up it got past POST and loaded Windows 2000 completely. Then the computer auto restarted and hasnt gotten past POST now... Would that eliminate either the HDD being faulty or the OS/Registry being corrupted

****I tried setting it up with a HDD with Win98 OS in the 'master' that I KNOW works and running the Win2k OS in the 'slave' position. Do OS need to be the same just to look through the slave HDD?

Thanks for all the feedback I am still fairly new to computers...

bloodwynd

Well, it does indicate that the OS is not corrupted. The problem with the "_" when you start the system indicates that your computer is looking for a bootable device. Are there any other devices connected to your computer, specially USB devices? If there are, remove them and try it again.

Also, it still does not eliminate the fact that the HDD might be going bad. A HDD that's about to go bad normally shows this kind of symptoms, that the system will be able to boot up once and then it won't by the second time. I would suggest trying to run chkdsk if you have the ability to boot into a DOS prompt.


As far as my experience goes, it does not need to. However, you need to consider the File System type that the slave is using. If its using FAT or FAT32, it should be fine.