I have questions about how your drives are cabled and jumpered.

Generally speaking, there are only 3 ways what you are describing happens.

1) you have confused which IDE channel is primary, have your boot drive on the secondary channel, and have attached the new drive to the primary channel. When the bios inits, it finds a partition marked active on the slave drive of the primary channel, and attempts boot, then fails. It skips the secondary master, which is your real boot drive, because the boot process never makes it there.

2) you have confused which drive is master or slave. You have attached the new drive as the master drive on the only existing IDE channel, and there is a partition marked 'active' on that drive, which the bios tries to boot first, similar to the above.

3) There is a conflict on the IDE channel, as both drives are jumpered as either master, or slave, or as cable select without a CSelect cable present. The bios cannot communicate with either drive, and the boot process halts.

Please give us pictures of how these drives are cabled and jumpered.

Check all the above, and also check that there's not a boot priority setting in BIOS CMOS setup that has put drive D above drive C, or secondary over primary.

In theory, you should be booting off your 7.8GB drive still..

BUT, your BIOS is only likely to recognise up to 27GB hard drives, or the first 27 GB of the 60GB, so if it already was formatted to 60GB it won't see it. If it has a 20GB primary partition or partition under 27GB it should see that, but not the rest.

If the new drive was "blank" to you, nothing on it, then you could just make the biggest partition you can get, and use that and not worry about the part you are not using. Or you could look into getting a modded BIOS for 27GB+ support, which if you are not careful flashing or physically installing, could mess up your motherboard.

Optionally do a clean install with drivers and clone it that way you can put it on any drive you want to and swap harddrives when you want to use games or programs on each hard drive without having to delete anything.
Others might have info on booting menus for maximising partitions.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-01-14, 16:04:

I have questions about how your drives are cabled and jumpered. […]
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I have questions about how your drives are cabled and jumpered.

Generally speaking, there are only 3 ways what you are describing happens.

1) you have confused which IDE channel is primary, have your boot drive on the secondary channel, and have attached the new drive to the primary channel. When the bios inits, it finds a partition marked active on the slave drive of the primary channel, and attempts boot, then fails. It skips the secondary master, which is your real boot drive, because the boot process never makes it there.

2) you have confused which drive is master or slave. You have attached the new drive as the master drive on the only existing IDE channel, and there is a partition marked 'active' on that drive, which the bios tries to boot first, similar to the above.

3) There is a conflict on the IDE channel, as both drives are jumpered as either master, or slave, or as cable select without a CSelect cable present. The bios cannot communicate with either drive, and the boot process halts.

Please give us pictures of how these drives are cabled and jumpered.

this is all correct, but there is also the consideration that some hard drives have a different jumper setting for "single" (only drive on the cable) and "master" (slave must be present)

First thing I would do is look in BIOS and confirm that drive 1 is about 8G and drive 2 is about 60G (might be 0 & 1 depending on BIOS)

See if there is a key to override boot - if so, hit it during POST and tell it the appropriate number for the 8G drive.

You should also be able to go into the BIOS to set which drive to boot from.