OS problems

[iliveinabox]

i had some problems with my old harddrive so i baught a seagate 40 gig. i baught the computer from a friend and he didnt give me any disks to go with it so he gave me his backups of windows xp which was on it. i made the harddrive the master and hooked it up. i put the disk in and it says "master boot record error press a key" so when i hit a key it sayspress f1 to retry boot, f2 for setup utility. can anyone help

[classicsoftware]

You should first download the diagnostic software from seagte and test the drive. If the drive tests ok, I would use the Seagate software to format/partition the drive then reinstall the OS

[PrntRhd]

I agree, you should also expect it will ask for Product Activation for the installation as it is on new HDD/computer setup.

[Paul Komski]

"master boot record error press a key" Unless this is a prompt from the WinXP setup it seems a bit strange - it's more ususal to get an "Invalid system disk ..." type message for an unpartitioned/unformatted/brandnew hdd. Are you sure the BIOS setup is set to boot from the CD after going into it with F2? WinXP will usually automatically go ahead with the partitioning/formatting of new hdd.

Adding a new hdd isnt usually a big enough hardware change to force a re-activation though clean installing WinXP of itself will require it to be reactivated. If the original wpa.bak and wpa.dbl files can be retrieved from the other hdd's windows\system32 folders they can be used under minimal safe mode to "activate" the OS without contacting M$.

[iliveinabox]

i found out it was windows plus and not windows xp. so my i got the a different copy from a friend and when i laod it it says that the installation cant go because it was the 64 bit version i had and i need the 32 bit version. any one know whats goin on.

[Paul Komski]

Versions of "Plus" for the various Windows versions are add-ons/embellishments to the underlying OS. See HERE (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/plus/PlusHome.asp) for the two plus installations for WinXP. You will need to install WinXP from its own installation CD first. Most hardware uses 32bit architecture so you would need the 32bit version of WinXP to go with it. Also, using someone else's CD is likely to run you into activation problems.

[Sylvander]

Do you have a means of restoring "his backups of windows xp which was on it"?
Tell us more about this backup.
Before doing this you would need to partition and format the new HDD.
Then once you have the restored backup on the new HDD you would "repair" the Windows installation to take account of the new hardware [the HDD].
If Paul is correct in saying "a new HDD isnt usually a big enough hardware change to force a re-activation", then you will be off and running.

By-the-way Paul, I remember reading [I hope I have the right warning here] that you only see "Invalid system disk ..." because the HDD has been partitioned and formatted and during the boot process some code that is therefore resident in the master partition sector [the boot sector code?] has generated that warning [because it is unable to proceed to the next step in the boot sequence].
You cannot get that warning generated by a clean HDD.

[Paul Komski]

Sylvander you are quite correct that the "Invalid System Disk" error is read from the PBS (partition boot sector) of a FAT formatted floppy or hard drive partition that has been selected as the boot device but contains no boot/system files for an operating system. Other such messages in a FAT PBS are "Disk I/O error" and "Replace the disk, and then press any key".

On an NTFS PBS the messages are "A disk read error occurred", "NTLDR is missing", "NTLDR is compressed" and "Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".

On partitioned drives there are various messages actually within the MBR: "Invalid partition table", "Error loading operating system" and "Missing operating system".

I have never myself seen "master boot record error press a key" nor find something similar on Google - but perhaps it was just loosely typed by the poster. Trying to access a blank (factory) disk on my own pc produces "DISK BOOT FAILURE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" and which is presumably written from the BIOS. Checking its Sector0 showed that to be all zeros so it didn't come from the HDD.

With respect to changing hard drives.
All I can say is that I regularly install from one to three IDE hdds on my system, swap them around, reimage them, pop other ones in a swap bay for "sorting out" and "cleaning up", etc, etc. All of that has never yet produced a request to reactivate. The only time this occured is when I clean installed WinXP onto a pair of SATAs on a RAID1 - That setup seems to behave like the installation of a SCSI device, so perhaps that's not a real surprise. Even that was a bit odd since the installation of the SATA's didn't prompt WinXP installations on a IDE drives to look for reactivation. The only thing that might have been a bit "strange" was the installation of the RAID drivers by pressing F6 during the setup.