Dell Inspiron 8100 not booting with Compaq Hard Drive

Hello, I recently got a Dell Inspiron 8100 without a hard drive. I did get the carriage and adapter though. I had a 30gig hard drive from my broken Compaq Persario that booted just fine from the Compaq. I installed it into the Dell. The BIOS shows the hard drive just fine, booting from Knoppix I can mount the drive and read/write to it. I cannot however boot the previously installed Windows XP Pro from it. I tried Window’s recovery but that didn’t work either. I’m getting an error from the BIOS about a disk read error. This confuses me since another OS can read it just fine. I’m completely reinstalling Windows right now to see if that helps, but if it doesn’t can someone offer some help please?