Windows doesn't recognize drive

I'm working on a Dell Dimension 8400.
It has two SATA drives, one 500Gb and the other is 160Gb.
The Seagate 500 is getting flaky but still readable.
I used Acronis to clone the drive to a WD 500Gb drive.
OK, the 500Gb drive is the system drive. It won't boot.
So I use the Dell Recovery CD and when I attempt to go into the Recovery
Console, I get "Windows did not detect any hard drives".
Both drives show up in BIOS and Acronis sees them both.
If I take the drive out and slave it on another machine, Windows sees it
just fine.
The Western Digital drive is used but was working fine when I took it out
of one of my own computers. The cloning process took about an hour and a
half which isn't bad considering there was almost 400Gb of data.
If I put the old Seagate back in, it boots up fine and the Recovery CD sees
it just fine as well.
Why doesn't Windows like the Western Digital drive?

--
--- Everybody has a right to my opinion. ---

On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:58:23 -0500, "Lil' Abner"
wrote:

I'm working on a Dell Dimension 8400.
It has two SATA drives, one 500Gb and the other is 160Gb.
The Seagate 500 is getting flaky but still readable.
I used Acronis to clone the drive to a WD 500Gb drive.
OK, the 500Gb drive is the system drive. It won't boot.

What happens at this point, the typical bios message that no
bootable media is found?

Is the drive plugged into the same SATA port as the old one
was, and/or have you gone into the bios and set it as the
boot drive?



So I use the Dell Recovery CD and when I attempt to go into the Recovery
Console, I get "Windows did not detect any hard drives".
Both drives show up in BIOS and Acronis sees them both.
If I take the drive out and slave it on another machine, Windows sees it
just fine.
The Western Digital drive is used but was working fine when I took it out
of one of my own computers. The cloning process took about an hour and a
half which isn't bad considering there was almost 400Gb of data.
If I put the old Seagate back in, it boots up fine and the Recovery CD sees
it just fine as well.
Why doesn't Windows like the Western Digital drive?

If there a jumper for SATA150 vs 300 mode on the drive that
might need changed?

kony wrote in
:

On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:58:23 -0500, "Lil' Abner"
wrote:

I'm working on a Dell Dimension 8400.
It has two SATA drives, one 500Gb and the other is 160Gb.
The Seagate 500 is getting flaky but still readable.
I used Acronis to clone the drive to a WD 500Gb drive.
OK, the 500Gb drive is the system drive. It won't boot.

What happens at this point, the typical bios message that no
bootable media is found?

A message about no being able to find C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM (there is no such
folder, of course) and then a few lines about using the recovery console.
I can't replicate right now because I have the original drive back in.

Is the drive plugged into the same SATA port as the old one
was, and/or have you gone into the bios and set it as the
boot drive?

Yes, it's in the same port.



So I use the Dell Recovery CD and when I attempt to go into the
Recovery Console, I get "Windows did not detect any hard drives".
Both drives show up in BIOS and Acronis sees them both.
If I take the drive out and slave it on another machine, Windows sees
it just fine.
The Western Digital drive is used but was working fine when I took it
out of one of my own computers. The cloning process took about an hour
and a half which isn't bad considering there was almost 400Gb of data.
If I put the old Seagate back in, it boots up fine and the Recovery CD
sees it just fine as well.
Why doesn't Windows like the Western Digital drive?

If there a jumper for SATA150 vs 300 mode on the drive that
might need changed?

No jumpers.

I'll try it again tonight and get the exact wording on that error
message, but it's probably one you recognize. I've seen it bunches of
times in the past. A good percent of the time, it can be cured by running
chkdsk on the drive, but when the restore console doesn't see any drives
that option is out. I did run chkdsk on the drive when I had it slaved
to one of my other computers, and it didn't find any errors.
I've ordered another drive. If that works, then it will just have to
remain a mystery. I can always use the WD somewhere else.

Thanks for your reply. There's so much spam in this group that I wasn't
sure if anyone was still around... :-)

--
--- Everybody has a right to my opinion. ---

kony wrote in
:

On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:58:23 -0500, "Lil' Abner"
wrote:

I'm working on a Dell Dimension 8400.
It has two SATA drives, one 500Gb and the other is 160Gb.
The Seagate 500 is getting flaky but still readable.
I used Acronis to clone the drive to a WD 500Gb drive.
OK, the 500Gb drive is the system drive. It won't boot.

What happens at this point, the typical bios message that no
bootable media is found?

Is the drive plugged into the same SATA port as the old one
was, and/or have you gone into the bios and set it as the
boot drive?



So I use the Dell Recovery CD and when I attempt to go into the
Recovery Console, I get "Windows did not detect any hard drives".
Both drives show up in BIOS and Acronis sees them both.
If I take the drive out and slave it on another machine, Windows sees
it just fine.
The Western Digital drive is used but was working fine when I took it
out of one of my own computers. The cloning process took about an hour
and a half which isn't bad considering there was almost 400Gb of data.
If I put the old Seagate back in, it boots up fine and the Recovery CD
sees it just fine as well.
Why doesn't Windows like the Western Digital drive?

If there a jumper for SATA150 vs 300 mode on the drive that
might need changed?

OK. I got a new 750Gb drive in today and cloned the original Seagate
drive to it. I'm having the same results...
Can't find C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\WINDOWS
Then tells you to run the recovery console.
Push R for Recovery Console from Dell Recovery CD and it says it can't
find any disk drives.
Still stumped.

--
--- Everybody has a right to my opinion. ---

Lil' Abner wrote:
kony wrote in
:

On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:58:23 -0500, "Lil' Abner"
wrote:

I'm working on a Dell Dimension 8400.
It has two SATA drives, one 500Gb and the other is 160Gb.
The Seagate 500 is getting flaky but still readable.
I used Acronis to clone the drive to a WD 500Gb drive.
OK, the 500Gb drive is the system drive. It won't boot.
What happens at this point, the typical bios message that no
bootable media is found?

Is the drive plugged into the same SATA port as the old one
was, and/or have you gone into the bios and set it as the
boot drive?



So I use the Dell Recovery CD and when I attempt to go into the
Recovery Console, I get "Windows did not detect any hard drives".
Both drives show up in BIOS and Acronis sees them both.
If I take the drive out and slave it on another machine, Windows sees
it just fine.
The Western Digital drive is used but was working fine when I took it
out of one of my own computers. The cloning process took about an hour
and a half which isn't bad considering there was almost 400Gb of data.
If I put the old Seagate back in, it boots up fine and the Recovery CD
sees it just fine as well.
Why doesn't Windows like the Western Digital drive?
If there a jumper for SATA150 vs 300 mode on the drive that
might need changed?

OK. I got a new 750Gb drive in today and cloned the original Seagate
drive to it. I'm having the same results...
Can't find C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\WINDOWS
Then tells you to run the recovery console.
Push R for Recovery Console from Dell Recovery CD and it says it can't
find any disk drives.
Still stumped.


Use "dd" and make an exact, sector by sector copy of the disk.
Then try booting it and see what happens.

Plug the two disks, to a third machine, and run "dd" there.
You can use Windows "dd" port, or Linux standard "dd".
I would not try to clone a running copy of Windows by doing
this, but I expect the command will let you try if you want.
Which is why I recommend having some other OS booted, while
copying one disk to the other.

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

In a command window, do "dd --list". This will give the names of
the disk drives.

For maximum transfer speed, the command should be used with a
block size and count parameter. A block size of 32768, may be
big enough, to avoid doing too small transfers. Take the
total disk size, of the source disk, factor it into two numbers,
such that when they're multiplied together, they equal the total
claimed size of the disk.

This is a worked example, of using Windows "dd".

dd --list

\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 --- source disk
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk0\DR0
Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512
size is 160041885696 bytes

\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 --- destination disk
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DR1
Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512
size is 160041885696 bytes

\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 --- the whole raw disk
\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition1 \
\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition2 \___ my disk has four primary partitions,
\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition3 / but we want to back up the whole raw
\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition4 / disk

The disk is 160,041,885,696 bytes. The factors of that number are
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 7 11 9397

I divide 160,041,885,696 by 9397, then divide by some of the other
factors, until I get a small enough number for my purposes.

315392 * 507438 = 160,041,885,696

The first number is 616 sectors of 512 bytes each. That will be
my block size number. I try to stay under 512KB, because Linux
tells me that is the transfer size supported by my drive. Likely
a number larger than 32768 would be sufficient, to get efficient
transfer.

So now, my disk cloning command, from the 500GB to 750GB drive,
would be similar looking to this. I'd have to adjust the
bs and count, to exactly transfer the entire size reported for
Partition0 of the source drive. (As stated here, this would
clone my existing 160GB drive. Your count will be larger than
mine.)

dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 of=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 bs=315392 count=507438

About 4.5 hours later, your transfer should be finished. I seem
to get a transfer rate of about 30MB/sec, which is where my time
estimate for the 500GB drive comes from.

It is bad karma, to do a sector by sector transfer of a larger
drive to a smaller drive, as the end of the data will be
snipped off. So the destination drive should be the same size
or larger. In my dd --list info, you can see my two disks
are actually identical, so I meet the criterion. If I was
cloning a 160, and used an 80 as the destination, then the
last partition(s) could be severely damaged, by being absent
from the destination. The MBR will continue to have all the
dimensions of the original partitions. This method doesn't
resize anything. There are utilities for resizing, that can be
used, for example, to stretch the partitions on the 750GB,
to fill the available space.

HTH,
Paul

Paul wrote in
:

Lil' Abner wrote:
kony wrote in
:

On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:58:23 -0500, "Lil' Abner"
wrote:

I'm working on a Dell Dimension 8400.
It has two SATA drives, one 500Gb and the other is 160Gb.
The Seagate 500 is getting flaky but still readable.
I used Acronis to clone the drive to a WD 500Gb drive.
OK, the 500Gb drive is the system drive. It won't boot.
What happens at this point, the typical bios message that no
bootable media is found?

Is the drive plugged into the same SATA port as the old one
was, and/or have you gone into the bios and set it as the
boot drive?



So I use the Dell Recovery CD and when I attempt to go into the
Recovery Console, I get "Windows did not detect any hard drives".
Both drives show up in BIOS and Acronis sees them both.
If I take the drive out and slave it on another machine, Windows
sees it just fine.
The Western Digital drive is used but was working fine when I took
it out of one of my own computers. The cloning process took about
an hour and a half which isn't bad considering there was almost
400Gb of data. If I put the old Seagate back in, it boots up fine
and the Recovery CD sees it just fine as well.
Why doesn't Windows like the Western Digital drive?
If there a jumper for SATA150 vs 300 mode on the drive that
might need changed?

OK. I got a new 750Gb drive in today and cloned the original Seagate
drive to it. I'm having the same results...
Can't find C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\WINDOWS
Then tells you to run the recovery console.
Push R for Recovery Console from Dell Recovery CD and it says it
can't find any disk drives.
Still stumped.


Use "dd" and make an exact, sector by sector copy of the disk.
Then try booting it and see what happens.

Plug the two disks, to a third machine, and run "dd" there.
You can use Windows "dd" port, or Linux standard "dd".
I would not try to clone a running copy of Windows by doing
this, but I expect the command will let you try if you want.
Which is why I recommend having some other OS booted, while
copying one disk to the other.

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

In a command window, do "dd --list". This will give the names of
the disk drives.

For maximum transfer speed, the command should be used with a
block size and count parameter. A block size of 32768, may be
big enough, to avoid doing too small transfers. Take the
total disk size, of the source disk, factor it into two numbers,
such that when they're multiplied together, they equal the total
claimed size of the disk.

This is a worked example, of using Windows "dd".

dd --list

\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 --- source disk
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk0\DR0
Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512
size is 160041885696 bytes

\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 --- destination disk
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DR1
Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512
size is 160041885696 bytes

\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 --- the whole raw disk
\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition1 \
\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition2 \___ my disk has four primary
partitions, \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition3 / but we want to back
up the whole raw \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition4 / disk

The disk is 160,041,885,696 bytes. The factors of that number are
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 7 11 9397

I divide 160,041,885,696 by 9397, then divide by some of the other
factors, until I get a small enough number for my purposes.

315392 * 507438 = 160,041,885,696

The first number is 616 sectors of 512 bytes each. That will be
my block size number. I try to stay under 512KB, because Linux
tells me that is the transfer size supported by my drive. Likely
a number larger than 32768 would be sufficient, to get efficient
transfer.

So now, my disk cloning command, from the 500GB to 750GB drive,
would be similar looking to this. I'd have to adjust the
bs and count, to exactly transfer the entire size reported for
Partition0 of the source drive. (As stated here, this would
clone my existing 160GB drive. Your count will be larger than
mine.)

dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0
of=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 bs=315392 count=507438

About 4.5 hours later, your transfer should be finished. I seem
to get a transfer rate of about 30MB/sec, which is where my time
estimate for the 500GB drive comes from.

It is bad karma, to do a sector by sector transfer of a larger
drive to a smaller drive, as the end of the data will be
snipped off. So the destination drive should be the same size
or larger. In my dd --list info, you can see my two disks
are actually identical, so I meet the criterion. If I was
cloning a 160, and used an 80 as the destination, then the
last partition(s) could be severely damaged, by being absent
from the destination. The MBR will continue to have all the
dimensions of the original partitions. This method doesn't
resize anything. There are utilities for resizing, that can be
used, for example, to stretch the partitions on the 750GB,
to fill the available space.

Whoa! You lost me about 6 paragraphs up! :-)

I did not clone the drives under windows. I booted from the Acronis CD and
did it from there. Later today I was going to try it with Drive Image which
appears to be Linux based. Time remaining started out a 4 hours and got up
to over 4 days before I scrapped that idea. Right now I took both drives
and put them in another machine and am trying again with Acronis. I'm
beginning to think that Dell has problems since there have been some things
acting a little flaky in the BIOS setup.

Thanks for the input, but you're way out of my league!

--
--- Everybody has a right to my opinion. ---

"Lil' Abner" wrote in
news:Xns9C97EB2C94F77butter@wefb973cbe498:

Paul wrote in
:

Lil' Abner wrote:
kony wrote in
:

On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:58:23 -0500, "Lil' Abner"
wrote:

I'm working on a Dell Dimension 8400.
It has two SATA drives, one 500Gb and the other is 160Gb.
The Seagate 500 is getting flaky but still readable.
I used Acronis to clone the drive to a WD 500Gb drive.
OK, the 500Gb drive is the system drive. It won't boot.
What happens at this point, the typical bios message that no
bootable media is found?

Is the drive plugged into the same SATA port as the old one
was, and/or have you gone into the bios and set it as the
boot drive?



So I use the Dell Recovery CD and when I attempt to go into the
Recovery Console, I get "Windows did not detect any hard drives".
Both drives show up in BIOS and Acronis sees them both.
If I take the drive out and slave it on another machine, Windows
sees it just fine.
The Western Digital drive is used but was working fine when I took
it out of one of my own computers. The cloning process took about
an hour and a half which isn't bad considering there was almost
400Gb of data. If I put the old Seagate back in, it boots up fine
and the Recovery CD sees it just fine as well.
Why doesn't Windows like the Western Digital drive?
If there a jumper for SATA150 vs 300 mode on the drive that
might need changed?

OK. I got a new 750Gb drive in today and cloned the original Seagate
drive to it. I'm having the same results...
Can't find C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\WINDOWS
Then tells you to run the recovery console.
Push R for Recovery Console from Dell Recovery CD and it says it
can't find any disk drives.
Still stumped.


Use "dd" and make an exact, sector by sector copy of the disk.
Then try booting it and see what happens.

Plug the two disks, to a third machine, and run "dd" there.
You can use Windows "dd" port, or Linux standard "dd".
I would not try to clone a running copy of Windows by doing
this, but I expect the command will let you try if you want.
Which is why I recommend having some other OS booted, while
copying one disk to the other.

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

In a command window, do "dd --list". This will give the names of
the disk drives.

For maximum transfer speed, the command should be used with a
block size and count parameter. A block size of 32768, may be
big enough, to avoid doing too small transfers. Take the
total disk size, of the source disk, factor it into two numbers,
such that when they're multiplied together, they equal the total
claimed size of the disk.

This is a worked example, of using Windows "dd".

dd --list

\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 --- source disk
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk0\DR0
Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512
size is 160041885696 bytes

\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 --- destination disk
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DR1
Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512
size is 160041885696 bytes

\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 --- the whole raw disk
\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition1 \
\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition2 \___ my disk has four primary
partitions, \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition3 / but we want to back
up the whole raw \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition4 / disk

The disk is 160,041,885,696 bytes. The factors of that number are
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 7 11 9397

I divide 160,041,885,696 by 9397, then divide by some of the other
factors, until I get a small enough number for my purposes.

315392 * 507438 = 160,041,885,696

The first number is 616 sectors of 512 bytes each. That will be
my block size number. I try to stay under 512KB, because Linux
tells me that is the transfer size supported by my drive. Likely
a number larger than 32768 would be sufficient, to get efficient
transfer.

So now, my disk cloning command, from the 500GB to 750GB drive,
would be similar looking to this. I'd have to adjust the
bs and count, to exactly transfer the entire size reported for
Partition0 of the source drive. (As stated here, this would
clone my existing 160GB drive. Your count will be larger than
mine.)

dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0
of=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 bs=315392 count=507438

About 4.5 hours later, your transfer should be finished. I seem
to get a transfer rate of about 30MB/sec, which is where my time
estimate for the 500GB drive comes from.

It is bad karma, to do a sector by sector transfer of a larger
drive to a smaller drive, as the end of the data will be
snipped off. So the destination drive should be the same size
or larger. In my dd --list info, you can see my two disks
are actually identical, so I meet the criterion. If I was
cloning a 160, and used an 80 as the destination, then the
last partition(s) could be severely damaged, by being absent
from the destination. The MBR will continue to have all the
dimensions of the original partitions. This method doesn't
resize anything. There are utilities for resizing, that can be
used, for example, to stretch the partitions on the 750GB,
to fill the available space.

Whoa! You lost me about 6 paragraphs up! :-)

I did not clone the drives under windows. I booted from the Acronis CD
and did it from there. Later today I was going to try it with Drive
Image which appears to be Linux based. Time remaining started out a 4
hours and got up to over 4 days before I scrapped that idea. Right now
I took both drives and put them in another machine and am trying again
with Acronis. I'm beginning to think that Dell has problems since
there have been some things acting a little flaky in the BIOS setup.

Thanks for the input, but you're way out of my league!

OK. Success. Recloned the old 500 to the new 750 using Acronis on one of
my other computers. Put it back in the Dell and it booted up with no
problem.
Something in that Dell is not allowing Acronis to work properly.

--
--- Everybody has a right to my opinion. ---