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Jun 25th, 2006
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HD format from PC won't boot on Laptop

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Hello everyone. I have a Dell Inspiron 3500 laptop that only has a floppy drive (no optical drive). To skip a really long story which isn't relevent, here's my problem now:

I installed Windows NT 4.0 onto my laptop's hard disk using a desktop computer (with a laptop hdd to normal hdd adapter thingy). Then when I placed the laptop hdd back into the Dell laptop, it won't boot. The BIOS recognizes the drive, POSTs fine, but when it comes time to boot from the hdd, i get a black screen with a white blinking cursor.

I used some floppy boot disk that could read NTFS partitions, and everything is on my hdd. I can access files fine with that boot disk.

So why won't my laptop boot into NT? By the way, it has the latest A14 bios update, so it should work.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance! :cheesy:
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Re: HD format from PC won't boot on Laptop

Most OS need to be installed in the computer they are going to be use on !!!! especually if they are in the ntfs file format,its usually a motherboard drivers issue
Last edited by caperjack; Jun 25th, 2006 at 7:48 pm.
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Re: HD format from PC won't boot on Laptop

Are you saying there's absolutely nothing I can do to save this installation? :cry:

Would booting from the Windows NT install floppies, and opting to do a repair make a difference? Would it remove the service packs I installed?

Does anyone know how to boot a Dell Inspiron 3500 from a USB thumbdrive? Then I could install Windows NT from there...
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Quote originally posted by cobalt ...
Are you saying there's absolutely nothing I can do to save this installation? :cry:

Would booting from the Windows NT install floppies, and opting to do a repair make a difference? Would it remove the service packs I installed?

Does anyone know how to boot a Dell Inspiron 3500 from a USB thumbdrive? Then I could install Windows NT from there...
I have install window on 100's of computers ,but only installe NT once and that was a few yrs ago ,if you think you can put the install on a usb device then you should be able to put the hdd back in the other computer and format it and copy the nt install to it ,then put it back in the dell and run the install from the hdd with a windows boot disk .i done this with win95 and 98 on a laptop with no cdrom
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Re: HD format from PC won't boot on Laptop

Hmm... yeah I guess I have to go through all that. Again. lol (part of the long story)

Anyway, when the laptop hdd is in the desktop pc, should I format it as FAT32? then boot into that FAT32 partition on the laptop with a Windows 98 boot disk, and start the NT installation from DOS ? (because then during NT setup I can format a different partition as NTFS)

It's frustrating because I did that already, only to find that when I tried to install my WiFi card, it required Service Pack 4, and I had no way of getting SP4 onto the laptop. lol That's why I did everything from a desktop PC, hoping it would be easy as pie.
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Re: HD format from PC won't boot on Laptop

Quote originally posted by cobalt ...
Hmm... yeah I guess I have to go through all that. Again. lol (part of the long story)

Anyway, when the laptop hdd is in the desktop pc, should I format it as FAT32? then boot into that FAT32 partition on the laptop with a Windows 98 boot disk, and start the NT installation from DOS ? (because then during NT setup I can format a different partition as NTFS)

It's frustrating because I did that already, only to find that when I tried to install my WiFi card, it required Service Pack 4, and I had no way of getting SP4 onto the laptop. lol That's why I did everything from a desktop PC, hoping it would be easy as pie.
format it ntfs ,if you have the sp4 as a file copy it to hdd to and install it later.you can get a nt boot disk here http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm
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Jun 27th, 2006
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Re: HD format from PC won't boot on Laptop

I tried the NT bootdisk, but it's useless. Tells me to insert the CD and choose the repair option.

Anyways, I did eventually fix it. With Partition Magic, I had to format a partition as a Primary in FAT32. Logical Partitions (or extended, whatever) wouldn't show up when I booted with a Windows 98 boot disk.

Anyways, thanks for the help! :mrgreen:
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