HDD as invalid system disk?

[moonduck22]

after reinstalling a hdd that was in a computer, and wasn't touched while it was out, all of a sudden it doesn't recognize it as being connected to ide and says to insert a valid system disk. what could be wrong?

[Rkring1]

Are you reinstaling it in the same computer ? Have you added any hard drives or CD ROMS to the IDE channels ? Does the BIOS recognise the drive properly and is it installed as master on IDE 1 ? There are a lot of things that could be wrong , we need more specific info. <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

[DANIMAL]

Do you have a disk in the floppy/
Is it booting to A or C or CDROM?

[shamus]

I'm with these guys...did you check the BIOS first?
Depending on your system you need to press F1 or F2 or F10 or any number of keys when it boots to access it.What machine do you have?
Help is here if you can be more specific.

[AlienDyne]

Could you be more specific? What do you mean by "reinstalling the HDD"? Did you take it from another machine? Is this the second HDD installed on that machine? Have you checked the jumper settings?

[Garak]

if your reinstalling the drive in the same pc, then i would check the BIOS to make sure the drive is detecting correctly, if its a different machine, make sure the drive is detected as it was in the previous machine as if the drive is detected by different settings the partition on the drive will not be correctly read from the drive, thus not booting, the drive usually has 3 modes, Normal, CHS and LBA, good luck.

[freddy]

if its going in another machine , check that the disk is being seen by the bios , and boot from a floppy and see if u can "see" drive c: if you can see it then type sys c: from a disk that has sys.* on it

make sure that you put the correct sys files on.
it could be that you have mucked up or even duplicated the master boot record