R40 New Hard Drive issues

[Manarius]

I've searched for a while now and can't come up with an answer to my question so here goes nothing:

I picked up an old R40 from my uncle for use as a backup machine. Well my brother started using it as his daily and crashed the old 40GB hard drive. So, lucky for him, I use a 2.5in IDE drive in a USB enclosure as one of my backup drives. It's already formatted and initialized with NTFS so it should be good to go in as a replacement for the R40's old HD, right?

I got through the Windows install right up to the part where the machine boots from the hard drive to finish the rest of the install and the machine just refuses to boot the new hard drive. The copying part of the install went perfectly fine with no errors, but the machine won't boot the new hard drive. I can put it back in my USB adapter and load it on another machine, but the R40 won't boot it.

Any suggestions? I'm stumped.

::EDIT:: Also, by "won't boot" I mean that the machine stops at the infamous blinking cursor in the upper left of the screen.

[RealBlackStuff]

Check in the R40 BIOS if that HD is recognized at all.

[vanaya]

That was the same problem I was at. RBS is right in suggesting if the hdd is being recognized. My problem was that after so many insertions of hdd's made two of the IDE contacts get forced out the back side of the IDE connector. I fixed mine by keeping hdd inserted and pushing the contacts back in. But that only worked once as I forgot about my quick fix and removed the hdd a year later. Now my mb is being repaired by another forum member replacing the whole IDE connector. Do you need the info on the drive? If so, back it up. Then run a format utility to 1) verify the hdd is being recognized and 2) to start with a clean slate and re-install the OS. Hope this helps!!

[Manarius]

The hard drive is being recognized. Otherwise, the first half of the XP install wouldn't have worked.

[vanaya]

Just to pin point where the hang up is. When you are in the windows install, do you get the prompt where you want to do fresh install or repair your current installation. Does it show any partitions to choose from? Did you format before proceeding this question?

[Manarius]

I did not need to format as the hard drive in question is my backup hard drive from a USB enclosure. It was already formatted with NTFS and I just chose to leave the partitions alone (even though the drive already has data on it that I put there as backup).

The copying files part of the install went through no problem, but the computer just goes to the blinking cursor when it needs to boot from the harddrive.