How do I swap out a PATA hard drive?

H

Hardball

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 24, 2002
Messages
175
I have an older desktop system that I want to upgrade from XP to Win7. I think the existing hard drive might be bad as I am unable to get Win7 to install. I would like to temporarily swap out for a different hard drive in order to see if Win7 will successfully install on the other drive. I want to preserve the existing drive so that I can swap it back in after testing the other drive. Do I just simply power down the system and remove the existing drive and then put in the other drive for testing the Win7 install? Do I then just repeat the process to put the original hard drive with XP back in after testing the other? I was just wondering f there were any other steps involved in order to do this.
 
The system in question is an old P4 1.6GHz on an Asus P4B266. It has the I845D chipset, so it's IDE only (pre-SATA). It has XP Home 32 bit on it, and I want to put Win7 32 bit on. I have made several disks with the Win 7 Pro 32 bit .iso from Digital River. I have tried these same discs (Verbatim DVD+R) on my system at home and they all read and load just fine.

I bought a refurb WD IDE hard drive today to see if the drive was at fault. The same thing happened as before. Most of the time the disc will not be read at boot, other times it will, but it will get to a point where the install would start and it throws up a message about
"Load Driver: A required CD/DVD device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disc, CD, or USB flashdrive, please insert now. Note: If the Windows installation media is in the CD/DVD drive, you can safely remove it for this step."
I am starting to think that maybe the CD/DVD drive is going up, or it just can't read the Verbatim's properly? I put in the original XP Home disc and it booted right up and would be able to install it, no problem.

Any suggestions, other that to build a new system, which isn't on the agenda till end of year?

For reference, the computer that I tried it on at home and that works, is very close in spec to the problem system. Not a modern system at all, basically the same.
Also of note, there is a single IDE hard drive on IDE 1 as master, and the cd/dvd burner is on IDE 2 as master.
 
It's either an ISO issue or a disc issue. Note how it says "CD/DVD device driver" and not HDD.
 
If it is an .iso issue, wouldn't it manifest itself on any system that I tried the disc on and not just the one? I can use the discs on my home system without issue, but none of them will work on the other system.
 
You can try to replace the optical drive or make a bootable USB windows 7 installation disk from the Windows 7.iso that you have and try to install Windows 7 on that PC from the bootable USB that you've made.(That is if the BIOS of this PC already supports booting from USB)
 
No dice on booting from the USB. This older computer does not have that option available, unfortunately. I just picked up a Sony refurbed DVD-Rom drive from Microcenter tonight, so I'll give that a try tomorrow.
 
Well it also could be that this is just too old for win7, a P4 1,6GHz is extremely old and slow and my phone is much faster than that. I own a museum of older parts but I usually don't try to make them run current software, the exception being a 3DFX Voodoo 2000 PCI that still runs in my windows 7 server (but the desktop is actually slowed down by that card so I'm going to replace it).
 
Turns out it was the Samsung CD/DVD burner. It would not properly read the Win 7 .iso disc that I created, with the same burner in question. I put in a $10 refurbed Sony and it read and loaded it without issue. Crazy.
 
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