Hard drive crash...need help to fix.?

Question

So last week my 40 gig hard drive on my other computer crashed.
I have ever so carefully removed it and replaced it with a new 160gig hard drive. In addition I have removed my old 20 watt power supply and replaced it with a 500 watt.

So I figured this would be easy. Install the new stuff, run the system discs and bam I should have it... well its not working.

Seems like the computer is not reading the CD's or something.
Any one out there able to thow me a bone on this?

Answer 1

Make sure that your BIOS is set to boot to CD first. Make sure that if your CDROM and HD are on the same ribbon that the jumper settings are correct. Make sure that you didn't accidentally jar the ribbon or power supply line loose from the CD when you were replacing the HD.

Other than that, there should be no other issues

Answer 2

1) Check your computer's owner's manual. Make sure that your CD drive is a bootable device. Older systems didn't always allow this.

2) Check your system's CMOS settings, make sure that the system will allow you to boot from CDs.

3) Check your CDs, make sure that they are bootable.

4) Did you remember to reconnect the power to the CD drive? Does its light turn on?

5) Did you set the new drive's jumpers correctly?

6) Buy a copy of Symantec Ghost and clone the old drive to the new hard drive. If the crashed hard drive still spins, then its often possible to recover the original system from the crashed hard drive, clone it to the new hard drive, and run scandisk on the new hard drive, and then simply boot.

Need more?

Answer 3

The hard drive may need to be set to primary boot disk.
there are jumpers on the back, depending on the type of hd.
Will the pc boot to the cd? you may have to set the bios to do that.

Answer 4

I think that should've worked. If it didn't work, I don't know another solution.