I partitioned and formatted my new hard disk drive, but a message just says there’s no operating system

Hard disk drive problem

After I cloned my old IDE hard drive’s data to the new one (also an IDE drive), and then repartitioned and formatted the rest of the drive, all of the partitions are visible to Partition Magic and the data is present, but the computer won’t boot. An error message comes up that says that there is no operating system.

Answer

Run your partitioning program (Partition Magic, or QTParted, mentioned in 2. above). Right-click the new drive with the mouse, and make sure that the partition with Windows installed on it is set to Active. Moreover, make sure that the boot IDE drive is installed on the motherboard’s primary IDE connector, and that it is jumpered as a master drive. There should be videos available on YouTube that show how an IDE PATA hard disk drive is installed as a master or as a slave drive.