I hooked up a new harddrive but when i turned the power on after installing, the screen is blank ?? help?

Question

When i said the screen was blank, there: there is no cursor, so how do i install an operating system?

Also I inserted an operating system disk and the screen was still blank with no cursor. ??

Answer 1

It could be one of two things:

A: You still have the old hard drive hooked up as well. If this is the case, then both of the drives are no doubt set up as the Master and if they're on the same IDE ribbon they can't communicate with the computer at bootup. Make sure to set the new drive to Slave if this is the setup you're using. Even if it's on another IDE cable connected to an optical drive then you probably have them on the same setting.

B. If this drive is all by it's lonesome, then you'll need to install an operating system on there. A new drive doesn't have any data located on the platters yet so it won't boot the computer.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Set the jumpers on the backside of the Hard disk Drive to echo its status. This status can be that of a Master Drive, a Slave Drive etc.

Since this is an extra Hard Drive the status has to be that of a Slave or a Secondary Master depending into which IDE Slot / IDE Ribbon Cable you connect it to.


EDIT:

After having figured out the above you need to follow up the rest below.

If you want to reinstall the OS then you have to get into the BIOS Setup of the Computer. In there make sure that you have selected the CD ROM Drive as the first boot device. Save and Exit. Insert the Operating System Setup CD into the CD-ROM Drive.

Then when you reboot the PC, Windows will automatically start the re-install of the Operating System.

Answer 3

If this is a second drive, then I'm thinking you don't have the jumpers set correctly. Set the jumper for the "C" drive to "Master" and the second driver to "Slave". Attach the second drive to the center tap on the same cable as the "C" drive. The new drive will need to be formatted. After that, all should work.