[RedWingsFan1]

I recently installed a 160GB Seagate hard drive in my HP (which is running Windows XP SP2), setting it up as the master and using the original drive as the salve drive. Everything seemed to go well, and both drives were recognized in the BIOS, as well as Device Manager and Drive Manager. However, only the new drive was recognized in My Computer.

The new drive has XP on it, the old drive (slave) has only the HP Recovery Partition (disks not supplied and no longer available). In trying to resolve this, I did something pretty dumb -- I reversed the drive letters so that the old drive was now the C: drive (and now it showed up but not the second drive). Unfortunately, because this drive no longer had an OS, I can no longer boot into Windows (tried Safe Mode, etc.). I have tried to boot with both drives connected, and also with only the old drive connected and with only the new drive connected. I cannot access the HP recovery using the F10 key either. No matter what, I only get the Windows XP blue screen (interestingly enough, the cursor shows).

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[ozrom1e]

Welcome to TSG....

How did you switch the drive letters around on the two drives? The only way I can think is to use Disk Management in Windows, or did you switch the drives around on the cables?

 

[RedWingsFan1]

I used Disk Management, thinking that I could switch them back later.

 

[RedWingsFan1]

I should also mention that I don't have any Windows disks because HP chose to put the recovery info on the hard drive. I've tried making set up disks (using another computer of course) as referenced in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, but when I try them in my computer the set up never works. This is a 5 year old computer, so I don't want to have to spend a lot of money repairing it obviously, but I also don't want it to be just a large paperweight. Any thoughts, please?