Thinkpads Forum

Netvista 6571
Pentium 3 900 MHZ, 512 RAM
Existing 30 gig drive is towards the end of its life.

Removed a booting 40 GIG drive from a 500 MHz Compaq and installed it hoping it would be a direct swap due to both machines running Intel chipsets.

Getting missing ntldr press any key

Put the WINXP CD in the CD Drive but it will not boot from CD unless I remove the HD from the HD cable. I was hoping to do a fixboot from the WINXP repair console.

The bios will not let you change the boot device.

The Compaq hd boots with no problem back in the Compaq.

The Netvista boots fine when it's 30 Gig drive is put back in.

Any ideas how to get round this.

Drumtochty wrote:Removed a booting 40 GIG drive from a 500 MHz Compaq and installed it hoping it would be a direct swap due to both machines running Intel chipsets.

The chances of this booting successfully are very low in my experience.

If you can connect both HDDs to the Netvista (you may need to change jumpers on one drive to make this fly), your simplest solution would be to then clone the entire contents of the 30GB HDD onto the 40 GB HDD, remove the 30GB drive and set up the 40Gb drive as the boot drive.

Acronis True Image software will definitely allow you to do this and there is probably other disk cloning that would also work.

Cheers,

Bill

I wouldn't count on IBM and Compaq having identical HALs. And if they don't, the system will not boot. Doing an XP repair should reinstall the correct HAL, though.

However, your error message is indicating a problem earlier in the boot process. When you booted into the recovery console, did you check the contents of boot.ini? Also, are the IDE configs identical on the two systems (ie hard disk as master on channel 1, CD/DVD as master on channel 2, or something similar)?

You cannot boot to the recovery console.

If the ex Compaq HD is in the machine it always boots to the HD and says cannot find ntldr.

It will not do the boot to cd and do the press any key that most machines will do to boot from the cd if there is a HD in the machine.

I cannot get it to boot to a floppy.

It will but from CD if it does not find a HD.

eddie

Sorry ... what I meant was booting to the recovery console from the CD. Or does that not work, either?

And I presume the BIOS on the NetVista sees the Compaq HD just fine, right?

Make the CD your first boot device in the BIOs and you should be able to install the new hard drive and re-install windows no problem.

You could also try to uninstall COMPUTER (ACPI) from the device manager on the Compaq. Shut down. Switch hard drive to the IBM, boot up with a Win CD in the CD rom, and Windows just might repair itself enough to load the Compaq build on the IBM. This has worked for me before, but then again it has also failed me before. Just depends on the hardware.