700m hard drive swap=ntldr

I've just bought a 700m and want to use my HD from my dell note book inspiron 7500...the 7500 was upgraded from win98 to xp pro...when i try to boot it in the 700m i get an ntldr error...not sure if i have a BIOS issue has anyone out there worked through this problem...I know that formatting the 7500 hard drive in the 700m and reinstalling the software will work...that is not what i want to do...i want to use my 7500m harddrive or clone thereof with all my files and software intact.

Thanks much.

Jake

 

check this out http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm

 

Thanks have been there already...my next try will be to convert fat to ntfs format...so we'll see i'm away from the 700m for a few days...



<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by imtjm

 

Hi jake,
You really do need to reinstall XP from scratch, it's not like windows 9x where you could just copy everything over. You could try booting in safe mode and then deleting all the hardware and have it redetect everything; but this shortcut you think will save you some time will( if you ever get it to work) in the long run end up costing you much more time in troubleshooting weird instability issues,system crashs and more. Do yourself a favor and do a clean install.

Jack

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" (Ben Franklin)
http://pbase.com/joneill

 

so jack u recommend that i do a fresh install on my hard drive from the inspiron 7500 in the 700m over the existing win xp..?


Thanks

Jake

 

you really really want to install XP from scratch on a fresh hard drive... You can get some damn strange problems otherwise...

I know this seems kinda obvious - but have you checked that the hard drive is properly plugged in???

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by jake

 

ok, you have several options. first, would be the recommend solution of doing a clean install of the OS since you upgraded from WIN98 to XP. or second, boot from th XP cd, go to "install windows" and then it'll get to a point where it says something like:

1 format and install
2 install over
3 F8 to repair install

do a repair install, it will save all his data and settings.

but, i would highly recommend, deleting all partitions, repartitioning, formating, and then installing XP.

 

Ok here is a ? How would u format a hard drive and make sure it is wiped clean...is fdisk the way to go, since i'm into win xp and it likes ntfs...would the same drive work in the inspiron 7500 and the 700m formated ntfs...i've bought a book published by QUE called windows XP pro by Robert Cowart & Brain Knittel...

Thanks all

Jake

 

you can do several different things, but the easiest is to boot from the XP disc (go into bios and change boot sequence for cdrom first). here is a link that is very detailed with graphics or text version of explaining how to do a clean install. http://www.theeldergeek.com/xp_pro_install_-_graphic.htm

from your post, you had XP running on your 7500. If it was working then, it will work still when you do a clean install. now I ran into this article about the 7500 and windows xp http://obri.net/tech/dell/
i had a i5000e and XP came out a couple months after i got it and Dell dropped the bomb on me that it wasn't supporting XP on that system. likewise, dell didn't support XP for 7500, but if everything was working when you upgraded to XP, it will still work. on mine, the only thing that didn't work as designed was the audio driver that allowed me to adjust the volume from the buttons on the side, but i found an article and old driver that gave me that functionality again. i then ignored windows update for that driver. if you are reverting to an old driver, you will probably get a message that says device not tested or something for XP, do you still want to continue.

if you boot from XP disc you can delete partitions, create partitions and format partitions. As someone else wrote, since it's your first wipe, I would do the long NTFS formatting. yes, the HD will work in either if you formatted to ntfs.