Dimension 8200 sees wrong HDD capacity after Win2K update, will not boot

Question

My Dell Dimension 8200 was working fine using a 320 GB Seagate HDD, formatted in NTFS, running Windows 2000 Pro.  A few days ago I received a update notification from Microsoft, so I just allowed it to update, since I had never had any trouble with updates before. After the update, the system would give me the 'blue screen of death' when booting windows. After many attempts at starting in Safe Mode, I installed an old HDD as the master, and set my 320 GB HDD as the slave.  After booting from the old drive, Computer Management/Disk Management reports that the 320 GB Seagate drive is only 128 GB.  And yet the BIOS setup still reports the correct size as 320. Any advice would be appreciated.   I have since tried to setup an old HDD to make the system useable, but so far I have not been able to get my Gainward GF2 T1 64MB graphics card driver to work. It will only run in the lowest VGA mode. I would really like to get my 320 GB drive back up and running since that OS had all of the correct drivers for this machine.   thanks in advance, -Jeff Message Edited by Jeff_1 on 08-27-2007 04:53 PM Message Edited by Jeff_1 on 08-27-2007 04:56 PM

mombodog · Answer

' I installed an old HDD as the master '   What system did it come from, what OS and service pack level is on that drive.   You are better off putting the 320 back in as the boot drive and try to toubleshoot the bsod.

Jeff_1 · Answer

The old drive was from an older PC. I installed a 'virgin' copy of Windows 2000 pro, re-formating the drive in the process. I also downloaded and installed the latest MS updates. It now has the same Windows 2000, service pack 4, with the latest MS updates, as what I had on my troubled 320 GB drive. The only problem is that I didn't have the driver for my Gainward (nVidea) GF2 T1 graphics card, and I could not get the driver I downloaded from nVidea to work. But you are right, I need to concentrate on getting the OS on the 320 GB drive working, and not trying to 're-invent' it. The problem is I cannot get the 320 to boot, even in safe mode, and I cannot read the drive when I boot from the old one. I guess the next thing to try is to remove the 320 drive and try it in another PC, just to make sure it is OK. I was wondering if anyone else had the same problem when they had been using a drive successfully for a while, and then after a crash the OS was reporting a wrong, much smaller, capacity. It shows 128 GB instead of 320 GB in my case. Its as if large drive support just stopped working, although the BIOS does display the right size.

mombodog · Answer

Try F8 at boot and select 'disable auto restart on system failure' this way the bsod will stay up so you can read it and post it back here.   Does not sound good for that drive, something got scrambled in the MBR I think.   There are some editing software's out there for editing the MBR, but require advance knowledge to use.

mombodog · Answer

'Try F8 at boot and select 'disable auto restart on system failure' this way the bsod will stay up so you can read it and post it back here.'   Still waiting........

Jeff_1 · Answer

Well, I finally tried the 'bad' drive in another PC. The generic PC had an ASUS motherboard with an AMD Athlon 1800, also running Win2K pro.  I mounted the 'bad' drive as a 2nd, slave drive. This PC had no problem recognizing that the 'bad' drive was 300 GB, and had no problem reading the drive. So I do not understand why this drive works in one Win2K machine but not another. If the MBR was corrupt, wouldn't it cause problems in any PC that it was installed in? Or is this only a problem if the drive is the boot?  Maybe the BIOS is somehow to blame. -Jeff

Storage, Drives & Media

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