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installing different hardrive

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by bentleybuilt

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I am putting a hardrive from my old computer into one that has more memory. How do I get the bios to read the new hard drive. The "new" computer had windows 98 running before and the RAM config can be increased, whereas my old motherboard could not. The hard drive I'm putting in has XP Pro on it. Do I need to dosomething diffierent with the bios? I just got laid off and can't reallly afford to re-build or buy a new computer. Can anyone help? Thanks, Dierk

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by older mycroft

It will only boot in the computer where XP Pro was installed onto it.

When XP is installed, part of the installation process involves the building of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). This is a complex scan of the hardware within the computer and determines which driver files are incorporated into the build of the operating system.

Each computer has different hardware, therefore the HAL for each computer is unique. You will have to wipe this hard drive then invoke a completely new installation of Windows XP Pro onto this new hard drive.

Should you wish to save data from this drive before re-installing you could put it back into the old computer and boot from it, then save the data you wish to retain. Alternately you could boot into Win98 on this new machine, accessing the new hard drive as a slave, and copy the required data off that way (if Win98 can read from the XP hard drive).

by robo_dev

The main thing that Windows cares about is the disk controller hardware, since those drivers are part of the kernel. 90% of the time if you swap a motherboard with the same hard drive, the result are those pretty BSODs after the Windows splash screen.

To transplant a hard drive with a working XP OS to another computer:

Boot the drive on your OLD system, go into control panel and switch the IDE drivers from what you have now (mine are some Intel driver) TO the generic Microsoft IDE driver. From there, in most cases the drive will work with most other motherboards.

Windows can discover most other hardware properly, but disk controllers tend to be tricky.

do a google search on 'new mobo bsod'

Of course you can do a 'repair install' of XP, and that will do the same thing, but takes longer.

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/07/09/move-windows-xp-hard-drive-or-change-motherboard-without-getting-blue-screen-of-death/

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