A31 gets 250GB PATA Drive from Western Digital, Problems...

[sausage888]

I am still pushing my A31's to the limit. The latest is upgrading my 100GB Hitatchi 5400RPM hard drive right up to a 250GB Western Digital 5400RPM, model WD2500BEVE. This is a slave drive in my UltraBay2000 slot.

I insered the new 250GB drive into the UltraBay, brought up Disk Management in XP and formatted the new drive with a single partition, then copied my 100GB drive onto the new one. This all worked fine and I was able to check and view the contents of the copy on the new drive, so for all I knew - all was well.

BUT, the first time I re-booted - my A31 hangs while seemingly trying to boot from the slave drive (250GB) instead of my C: drive. I never had any problem with my old 100GB slave drive, why now?

It seems that XP did not have a problem, but maybe the BIOS does. I have BIOS version IGET41WW 1.13, which is the latest.

[schen]

I don't think you can do it that way. I believe you have the correct XP files, but haven't the new disk's OS bootable. What your going to need to do is the "clone" your disk instead of simply copying it. Use something like Acronis True Image. I've done this quite a few times using Acronis and it's been great every time. You can get a trial version from their site and use it. I liked it so much, I ended up buying it the second time I needed it.

In fact my first machine to do it on was an A31 where I cloned the HDD onto a newer/bigger HDD in the UltraBay2000.

[jrv331]

It sounds like you were trying to boot with both drives in, if so I had the same problem when I got a second drive for my A31. For me the solution was that the second drive HAS to be in the bay on the right side. If using just the single new drive I agree the drives to be cloned. Several good free programs out there.
John

[sausage888]

Final resolution:

After doing a whole bunch of downloads and firmware updates, etc. (apparently needlessly), I finally discovered that the new 250GB drive reads just fine from the RIGHT UltraBay, but causes my BIOS to not find the operating system if it's in the LEFT UltraBay.

This was true on either of my A31's, which are virtually identical except that my second A31 had none of the downloads and firmware updates applied to it, so apparently none were needed.

I have routinely kept my secondary HDD in the LEFT UltraBay, pretty much permanently while swapping out various gizmos in the RIGHT UltraBay: like CD/DVD or Floppy or a third HDD so that I could take a copy of my secondary HDD. All without any problems, although I had only been using up to 100GB drives.

Why would my RIGHT UltraBay be able to interpret a 250GB drive while the LEFT UltraBay can't? Apparently, this had nothing to do with 137GB barriers or 48LBA addressing or anything else as my alternate machine even has a much older version of the BIOS.

[jrv331]

From what I was told, the right side is an ultrabay plus and the left is a ultrabay. I have no clue what that means but looks like we both found the same solution.
John