Hi! I am currently running a Packard Bell 486ES with an 8.4 gig Maxtor Hard Drive (Model 90840E5), (using EZ Bios because the bios are too old to recognize such a big drive). I am trying to install a second Maxtor Hard drive (a 514 meg drive Model 7540AV). I went to Maxtor's site and set the jumpers to what I believe to be right. I also went in and reset the bios settings for the new drive. The problem is that when I start up it says, "No boot sector found on hard disk". What am I doing wrong?

I think it's trying to boot on the little HD and it isn't formatted. Check the jumpers again on both drives. The machine's also too old, stick with just one HD.

Just a thought. Possibly, because the primary drive was configured using EZ Bios, the second drive also has to be configured that way? Unless the 512 has valuable files you wish to transfer to the 8.4, as Bruce said, it probably isn't worth the effort to mount such a small drive.

The second hard drive can be a useful backup drive. I partition my main drive into several, use c for programs only and d for main data that I really care about, E: etc. for less important stuff, and at the end of a day back up D: to a second physical drive. If when you boot up it says theres no boot sector, Bruce is right, the jumpers are wrong. The old drive is set as master not slave. It's possible unfortunately that if the drive is old enough you can't get the jumpers right to work with the new drive, but I've done this with lots of old drives and rarely had a problem. It's also possible that the ez-bios is causing a problem, but I don't THINK so. Also, if you like the idea I opened with, when you fdisk the old drive, DON'T create a primary partition, only an extended and a logical partition, and it will end up as the LAST drive letter, not D: as it would otherwise.