Boot up issue

[BlackHawk1]

Hi. I hope you can help. We have a situation with a friends HP desktop running Windows 7. Link to his make/model desktop... http://tinyurl.com/b4yk2ev

The computer starts up to "boot disk failure please insert disk press enter." This is a 500GB Seagate SATA drive. I tried a "repair start up" and it didn't help. I then took the hard drive out and connected it to a dock, but the drive only shows up occasionally in My Computer. When connected and briefly recognized it will say that the drives needs formatted. When trying to format it says the format failed. I also got error 0x80300025 at some point. The drive will show up in disk management and it comes up as unallocated. So I took a 160GB working drive out of another HP computer running Windows 7 and put it in the computer that is having the "boot disk failure please insert disk press enter" issue. This 160GB drive came from a HP slimtower model s5220f, located here... http://tinyurl.com/b9ldaa9 The 160GB drive is also made by Seagate. After placing this known working drive in the problem tower it wouldn't boot to Windows and it went to "Start up Repair" went through that and came up with "Start up Repair cannot repair this computer automatically." I thought that was odd. I thought this working drive would allow the problem computer to boot right up. I thought the 500GB drive was toast, but now that I put a working drive in the bad tower and I still have an issue I'm not so sure. Is this a BIOS issue? CMOS? I am running the F9 HP diagnostics and the AMD CPU passes, the memory passes, and the 160GB hard drive passes all tests that includes "boot path."

I'm stumped. Help in this matter is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[OneMoar]

sounds like the drive is toast replace it and reinstall windows and start over its perfectly normal for a drive out of another machine to not boot in another because of hardware differences unless the machines are EXACTLY THE SAME

[BlackHawk1]

Originally Posted by OneMoar

sounds like the drive is toast replace it and reinstall windows and start over its perfectly normal for a drive out of another machine to not boot in another because of hardware differences unless the machines are EXACTLY THE SAME

Thank you!!! I thought the other drive could possibly be incompatible, but I've had situations were it worked out before. Being that both of these were in HP's I thought that would increase my chances of a match. All I have at the moment is a 2.5" laptop SATA drive. You think that may work? I think I will give it a try here in a few minutes. Thanks again!

[HammerON]

Why not just re-format (fresh install of Windows) the 160GB drive and call it good?

[OneMoar]

Originally Posted by BlackHawk1

Thank you!!! I thought the other drive could possibly be incompatible, but I've had situations were it worked out before. Being that both of these were in HP's I thought that would increase my chances of a match. All I have at the moment is a 2.5" laptop SATA drive. You think that may work? I think I will give it a try here in a few minutes. Thanks again!

sometimes you can get away with moving a drive sometimes you can't windows 7 is indeed a bit smarter then that then XP was
you can try the following if you are really desperate and don't have a windows 7 disk
boot the drive in the good machine and open a command prompt with admin rights
type %windir%\System32\Sysprep\Sysprep.exe or just sysprep
select System Out-of-Box-Experience and check Generalize DO NOT INTERRUPT THIS PROCESS IT WILL RENDER THE INSTALLATION UNBOOTABLE
power down and install the drive in the other machine
WARNING THIS WILL DELETE SOME PROGRAMS AND OR DRIVERS and possibly some user files
the process will need to be run again if you wanna move the drive back ...

Also double check that machine both machines are either set to AHCI or native ide in the bios the need to be the same if the bios of machine A(the working one) is set to ACHI then make sure machine b is also set to ACHI in the bios or conversely native IDE

[erixx]

^^ That observation in the last sentence may be part of the issue...

[BlackHawk1]

I have a Win7 disk. Guess what... the 500GB hard drive is the problem. I put the spare laptop drive in and Win7 is now installing. Time to order him a new drive. I thank all of you for the help! I guess what threw me off is the test on the bad 500Gb drive came out ok for some reason. The 160GB drive has never had a problem... just making this known to the other poster. I didn't want to format it because it's an extra computer I personally use for a HTPC. Thanks people!

[HammerON]

Glad to hear that you got it sorted out