I have an (ancient) HP Pavilion 7840 with a Cognac Motherboard (200731). Windows Xp was installed by someone after market and has never run properly. I found where HP shows the bios should be 3.07 and what was installed was 4.06 so I set the bios to hp specs. Using an old 3 gig HDD I can use the recovery discs to get windows ME on the machine, but when I try to put XP back on it gives me the error message: setup could not determine the size of 1 or more mass storage devices in your system. I have re-installed XP on this machine a couple of times over the years and have never had this error message until I changed the bios. I have an 80 gig Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (ST380013A) hard drive and a 30 gig Western Digital (WD 307AA) hard drive. Whenever I connect either of these 2 drives as the slave it slows the computer down drastically. I am not sure what to do from here...Please advise
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Jump to PostThis may not solve the problem but instead of having two hard drives on one cable try putting one on the same cable of the cd/dvd drive, or have you done this?
Jump to PostWell if you can get both drives working I would install XP on the bigger drive and leave ME on the smaller one.
if you cable to the CD drive has a spare connection put the smaller one on that and put the bigger hard drive on another cable.
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Jump to PostQuick question did you have both drives set as slave?
Jump to PostHmm...
Okay then, Have you tried removing the small hard drive and installing XP on the bigger one?
Also try setting both hard drives to auto select or master and anything else on the same cable as slave. Then set boot priority.
Does each hard drive work …
Jump to Postyo may want to check your hard drives with Hard disk sentinel, in another computer, to see if they still good for booting.
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