Win XP Pro: fresh install won't boot

I'm upgrading an old computer from a 20gb harddrive to a 250gb drive.

The 250gb drive is a Western Digital USB external that I connected to another system and verified that it loaded properly and had been formatted before it was put in storage. I removed the IDE drive from the external USB housing and removed the 20gb drive from the tower, then installed the 250gb drive into the tower.

After starting the machine back up, I set the BIOS boot order to: IDE0; CDROM; floppy (this computer is that old...)

The drive has the jumper setting at Master, and is plugged into the end of the ide cable, it is the only item on that cable. BIOS recognizes it during POST as being the primary master, and idetifies it as a 250gb WD drive.

I booted from my XP Pro install disc, and installed XP successfully using a 15gb partition for the install. When it boots up now, BIOS still identifies the HDD properly during POST, but it won't boot. I can only boot from CD.

I've tried using the Recovery console and the commands "bootcfg /rebuild" followed by "fixboot" followed by "fixmbr" and it still won't boot from the HDD.

If I don't go to the recovery console, the XP CD offers to repair the already installed system or install it fresh, I've tried repairing and I've tried deleting all partitions again and re-installing, no change.

ANyone have any ideas? This is driving me crazy and I'm sure it's gotta be a simple stupid fix that I'm overlooking, but I'm at my wit's end..

Department of Shoulda, Coulda, Wouda:  you might have been better off using a disk cloning app, e.g., Acronis True Image, to simply clone the 20 GB drive to the 250 GB drive.

However, ...

If the computer's really old, the BIOS may be having difficulty with the large disk, notwithstanding that you've only used 15 GB for the primary partition. IIRC, I used to have a Win 95 computer in which the BIOS did not automatically detect the disk, but rather had to be configured for the number of platters, tracks, etc.  If your BIOS is on the cusp of automatic detection, it may be stumbling over the size of the drive, so look in the BIOS not just for boot sequence, but for something to do with recognizing the drive.

Also note that Win XP had no support for disks over 137 GB prior to Service Pack 1.  What service pack level is your XP install CD?  If you have a pre-SP1 CD, you ought to slipstream it to make an SP2 CD (if you want to have an SP3 CD, you'll have to do it in stages, as SP3 requires either SP1 or 1a, and won't install properly from XP gold).

These may help:

"How to enable 48-bit LBA support for ATAPI disk drives in Windows XP: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=303013

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/237351-45-boot-large-hard-drive

no problem, like I said, I appreciate your time in trying to help.

I'm thinking maybe a BIOS thing too.. I guess it has been a LOOONG time since I've worked with an older machine, last time I did anything like this, you could still get BIOS flash updates for free.. now it seems they want $30 for a yearly subscription? WTH?

checked those links.. first one gets me a 404, second one is referring to laptops, and it's referring to a problem in which the system works fine for an indetermined amount of time and then forgets where the HD is..

mine only installs fully but never even boots once.

Sorry about that.  I thought I did a copy and paste: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013 -- but it's an sp1 article and probably won't help if you installed XP sp3.

The other one is a rather long and rambling thread that a number of people with different but related issues hijacked.  There may indeed be nothing in there that relates to your particular situation.  On re-reading more closely, it looks as if the common point in that thread is that all of the problems were related to the boot partition being > 137 GB -- which is not your issue ... and especially not so given that you installed XP sp3, which should be able to deal with large partitions.

To me, it sounds like a BIOS issue, but that's only a guess.

checked those links.. first one gets me a 404, second one is referring to laptops, and it's referring to a problem in which the system works fine for an indetermined amount of time and then forgets where the HD is..

mine only installs fully but never even boots once.

The 20gb had that stupid WinBorg XP ____ on it, since I own a legitamate copy of XP Pro I wanted to install that instead, I don't trust "hacked" tool collections with stolen software..

I know what you mean about the cylinder numbers and whatnot.. I vaguely recall my K6-II chip/board combo needing that information, this BIOS doesn't have those options though.. IIRC its Award ver 6.00, could probably use a flash, but it does accurately identify the HD during post as a WB 250gb..

My XP includes SP3 ver. 2002.

I'll check those links, thanks for taking the time to respond! I appreciate any and all help :)