Need quick reply

phiamapa

Weaksauce
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Jan 7, 2009
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My friend just called me, she just bought a new pc but is going to reuse her old PATA Western Digital WD800BB-00FJA0 hard drive but her new P5QL-Pro is telling her to pick a boot device. She already set in the BIOS the boot order but is still not booting. Is the hard drive not compatible with the mother board?
 
Boot priority should be:

cd-rom
hd
disabled

So make sure it even detects the IDE HD before continuing usually its in the first page of the bios or the "basic" setup or something close to that. Then more than likely you will have to do a repair install in order for it to boot. Windows XP doesn't like completely changed motherboards it usually tends to freak out.
 
There's no reason why the hard drive and the motherboard should be incompatible.

Have your friend download, burn onto a CD (or a flash drive), and run WD Data Lifeguard Tools.

If you still can't recognize the HDD, you'll have to perform a Repair Installation using the Windows disc.
 
More info needed. Does the new system have a HDD?
If so, which HDD does she want to boot with?
If using the old HDD as a boot drive, as amdownzintel mentioned, she'll need to do a repair installation. Is she using XP?
If so, its easy... just proceed as if you were installing... setup should detect her old installation and offer to repair it. She can confirm by pressing "R."
If she's using Vista, its a bit trickier.
If she wants to boot off of a new HDD, and simply use the old PATA drive as a secondary drive, then she has to make sure the HDD boot order is set properly (not just the device boot order; some BIOSes generalize boot order and require a separate order for each device).
 
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