Need help with an old Western Digital hard drive

**jdogsc** · 09-26-2007, 04:29 PM

I need help with an old Western Digital hard drive I put into my Compaq Presario 5310. I wanted to install an additional into my Compaq. So I took an old Western Digital hard drive from an older Compaq PC which I don't use anymore. The old compaq had the Windows 98 operating system and I put it into my Compaq 5310 which has XP. I set up the old drive into my Xp machine as a slave. However, I had forget to reformat the old drive. After connecting the old drive to my Compaq 5310 I get the “Non System Replace Disk” error when I turn on my computer. What can I do in a situation like this? Is there still any way I can reformat the Win98 drive (old drive) because I do not have the old computer anymore?

Thanks

**thetestingsite** · 09-26-2007, 04:33 PM

Go into the Boot Menu and boot to the disk with XP on it.

**jdogsc** · 09-26-2007, 05:24 PM

Originally Posted by thetestingsite

Go into the Boot Menu and boot to the disk with XP on it.

So you're saying to put in the Windows XP CD in and boot them there? What would happen after that?

**insanemonkey** · 09-26-2007, 05:46 PM

are you sure you put it on slave drive becuase if you did this shouldn't of happened, I have done this before..

make sure the back little piece thing is on slave drive...

i dunno but you might have to reboot your windows xp. onto your system...

**jdogsc** · 09-26-2007, 06:11 PM

Yes I did set the Western Digital Drive as a slave. I forgot to reformat this drive so it still has the Windows 98 Os on it.

**thetestingsite** · 09-26-2007, 06:38 PM

Originally Posted by jdogsc

So you're saying to put in the Windows XP CD in and boot them there? What would happen after that?

No, what you want to do is restart the computer. When the bios screen pops up, there should be an option for "Boot Menu"; usually it's F8 or F10. If that's not an option, usually in the BIOS settings itself (usually pressing F2 will take you to this menu) you can set the boot sequence to boot to the primary hd first, then the second one.

Hope this helps.