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How to disable a hard drive in bios?
Hi all, I have an Inspiron 530 with the latest BIOS. I took the hard drive out of my old computer (had previously given me the blue screen of death) and put it in as a 2nd drive in this 530. I have vista on the 530 and had xp on the old on. I have the disc and want to reinstall xp on the old on. How do I go into BIOS and disable the vista hard drive so I don't mistakenly reinstall xp on the wrong drive? I previously tried this with only moving the vista drive down and putting the xp drive as the first drive (after the cdrom) but somehow ended up overwriting my vista and had to completely reinstall vista (thank God for backups). I don't want to make that mistake again, how do I disable the vista drive so it doesn't know it's there until I'm done instally xp on the old drive? Thanks!
The_Namek
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July 18th, 2009 21:00
andreah1,
There are no online diagrams of the Inspiron 530 BIOS and it's difficult to tell which type it has from the available documentation. An easy solution to make sure you don't accidentally overwrite the Vista hard drive again would be to simply leave it disconnected from the motherboard & have only the drive you want to reinstall XP on attached then reconnect it afterwards.
andreah1
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July 19th, 2009 07:00
I don't know why it's such a secret on mine, I was REALLY hoping I didn't have to fiddle around with disconnecting but it seems the only way I'm going to accomplish anything.
The_Namek
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July 19th, 2009 12:00
Your guess is as good as mine on that. Unplugging the drive from the motherboard accomplishes the same thing in less steps though.