:eek: OK... this one has me stumped... My son did something to my old(now His) computer, and tried to do a full recovery on it. There is an 80gig as a master, and a 20gig slave. Recovery stopped at 33%, installation CD's at 85%. I took the drives out and put the 80 gig in mine, recovered it and defragged. This drive boots and runs my computer, but blank screen with cursor on His. The 20 gig will not boot mine, or His, just blank screen with cursor. Have tried new cables, tried as master and/or slave, but no go. If I put the recovery cd's in His, with either drive, nothing but a blank screen with cursor... oh yeah, can't do anything with the cursor, just keeps blinking, won't take data typed. On boot up screen, will not go into system recovery. Now here's the kicker... the BIOS setup asks for a password, but nobody has ever put one in, so I can't do anything with that either. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!! (He misses his WOW playtime):confused:

Why not install the drive in your PC as master/ install operating system / then reinstall in his? -- Savage

That's how I got the 80 restored, but it won't boot in His... boots and runs mine... the 20 is recognized as drive F on mine as a slave, can access files, will not boot as master (just blank screen)and when installed back in His, both drives go to blank screen... I don't even get the "no operating system found" message:mad: beginning to drive me batty!!

I take it your computer and your son's computer are different hardware?

When you installed Windows, drivers were installed for YOUR hardware. When trying to boot the same drive on different hardware (SON's), you get driver conflicts, and weird events start to happen, such as continuous rebooting, blank screen with a blinking cursor, etc.

Something first to try, remove the 20 gig from the IDE chain. Ensure the 80G is set as master, and try to boot. Same problem?

Boot from the Windows XP CD and do a repair using the recovery console.

In the recovery console, run "chkdsk c: /r". You can also try the "fixboot" and "Fixmbr" commands.

Exit recovery console, and proceed with a fresh installation, letting XP quick format the hard drive.

I might be wrong but I am sure that if you take out the small cmos/bios battery out for 60 sec it defaults to factory settings and there will not be a password when you next try and to get into the bios

Also some PC have a small jump (normally yellow)
There will be 3 pins the jumper covering 2 of them move the jumper to cover the middle and other pin that wasn't being used that will also reset the bios.

Last option I vagely remember, a course I went on and they had a floppy disk called bart disk this allows you to boot up any PC, and shows you all username and password for that PC give it a go. I have no more info on the bart soz

I might be wrong but I am sure that if you take out the small cmos/bios battery out for 60 sec it defaults to factory settings and there will not be a password when you next try and to get into the bios

Also some PC have a small jump (normally yellow)
there will be 3 pins the jumper covering 2 of them move the jumper to cover the middle and other pin that wasnt being used that will also reset the bios.

Last option I vagely remember, a course I went on and they had a floppy disk called bart disk this allows you to boot up any PC, and shows you all username and password for that PC give it a go. I have no more info on the the bart soz

Your right, resetting the BIOS cmos should reset the password and allow you to enter the BIOS. :)

Couldn't get into the recovery console, but luckily had an SP2 recovery tools disk I made up, ran chkdsk, fixboot and fixmbr. Tried each drive individually as master, neither would boot up His, but only the 80 would boot mine when tried. His is HP Presario, mine is a new Compaq Media Center. His won't even boot enough to start a full recovery with the Recovery CD's that it came with... I'll give the BIOS reset a try, and check for the jumpers... I'll Google that Bart Disk and see what I can find... :rolleyes: won't have a chance to check it all out until the weekend... Headed to Long Island... Thanks for the advice, and I'll let you know what happens... once again, thanks