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Booting from OLD hard drive?
Hi,
There has got to be an easy solution to this but I'm having no luck.
Here's what I did:
I installed a new SATA hard drive and left my old drive in place. Due to some problems using the new SATA drive (Office wouldn't work properly, etc) I would like to return to booting with my OLD hard drive and just use the new SATA one for storage. I know how to manually do this (F12 everytime I start the computer) but want to have it boot to the old hard drive automatically.
How do I do this?
Any help would be appreciated! Thank you.
It is an XPS and it says on the Owner's Manual model WHL. It is one of the older XPS models and was purchased in 8/03. It has Bios version A03.
In the Bios, here is what is listed in the Drive Configuration:
SATA Primary Drive - Hard Drive
SATA Secondary Drive -Off
Primary Master Drive-Hard Drive
Primary Slave Drive-Off
Secondary Master Drive-CD-Rom
Secondary Slave Drive-CD-Rom
Ide Drive UDMA-OnIn the Boot Sequence, Hard Drive C (SATA Drive) is listed as #1.
The problem is that the new drive (SATA) is assigned C, and I want to boot from the old drive which is now listed as G.
I used some software from Seagate (SATA drive) to copy files onto it from my old drive and things didn't go so well. Office no longer functions properly is the main problem. Have tried to reinstall Office but it doesn't work. Won't even let me remove Office. Some kind of installer issue from the research I've done. Anyway, Office still functions properly from the old drive on G, so I thought I'd go back to booting from G and just use the new SATA drive for media storage.
Syed Nizamuddin
69 Posts
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Posted May 18th, 2006 11:00
Could you please mention the service tag?
Just for future reference the Dell Moderators frown on the asking of a Service Tag number due to privacy concerns.
@Syed Nizamuddin wrote:
Could you please mention the service tag?
Syed Nizamuddin
69 Posts
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0
Posted May 18th, 2006 12:00
Make sure you back up all the data before you try this.Hope this link help youSyed Nizamuddin
69 Posts
1267
0
Posted May 18th, 2006 12:00
Hi Majestic,
Thank you for the information.
- Kittyrat, unlike some of the older Dell systems, the XPS model doesn't allow you to individually assign which hard drive to boot from. With your model, the system will always look for bootable SATA hard drive before it considers booting from an PATA IDE hard drive.
Syed Nizamuddin
69 Posts
1267
0
Posted May 18th, 2006 10:00