Got a Acer SA90 Desktop with a 500gb Sata drive running XP

Brought a new Samsung hd204ui 2tb drive and wacked it in place of the old 500 gb drive. Installede XP, but cant get it to boot after the initial installation.

Spoke to a few people and decided to install Win 7 as XP has limited Sata drivers. Win 7 installs but will not boot from HDD to continuie the setup. Same problem that I had when installing XP. You can look at the HDD and all the Win 7 files are there, it just wont boot from HDD

Any ideas

No expert here but have you tried altering the boot preferences from the BIOS?
Could also be a power supply issue with the bigger HDD?

Datsandy, get in here!

Cool Datto Master on this post.

Yeah set and checked bios. Have made HDD as first boot preference

Got the 2 tb running as secondary drive right now and booting and running XP on the 500mb drive. So know that the 2tb drive works

Hmmm got me stuffed.

If you get really stuck, I can have a look at it for you. No guarentees but im cheaper than your local shop. (ie free)
Just getting it to me is the challange.
I couldnt work in a help desk, cause i need to see the problem. No visuals make it damn hard.

DatsAndy, where art thou?

First thing that springs to mind is whether your Motherboard supports that size HDD. How old is the system ? Did the installation offer to format the drive ? Did it also offer to install the SATA drivers and give a list to choose from in the early stages of setting up for installation ?

If you have room in there, leave the 500mb one for booting up the use the 2tb to store stuff

I always leave the small drive for the operating system and applications that can be reinstalled from original media. Then you just image that once you have your setup right and use the big HDD for data and back it up weekly (and/or setup a raid array). - sorry I am used to designing systems in the Petabytes.

? did you set any of the jumpers on the HDD to Master / slave?

If the PC can read the drive, then the MB should be able to handle 2tb...do they still have master/slave jumper plugs on them these days?

Actually what Mik said would be ideal...
I have a similar setup
Leave your smaller drive as the boot, install and system drive (500gb is huge for that) and have the 2tb as a physical partition for storage of movies, mp3s, photos, ect

Makes backing up easier and reduces the risk of losing everything in the event of a virus/crash. Shouldn't affect the performance much at all if its SATA. With windows 7 you can use the nifty libraries feature to quickly find yr files too ;)

ha jinx demacoz!

...wtf is a petabyte :/?

a petabyte (in decimal terms) is a thousand terabytes.

Before you think that's more than anyone could use, I started off in the computer industry 27 years ago when a gigabyte was big.

Also bytes should not to be confused with files ... a petafile has nothing to do with computers