why won't my computer..?

Question

boot up to a hard drive i swapped out from a previous computer

Answer 1

All of those are wrong, some more wrong then others.

If you had windows installed on computer A and are moving that drive over to computer X, chances are good that it isn't going to work. The reason why is due to the chips on the motherboard. All motherboards, except for the most recent Intel boards, have the IDE channels go through the "south bridge" on the motherboard. If the southbridge changes, then windows won't boot because its using the wrong driver. For example, if the old motherboard used a SiS motherboard with a SiS chipset, windows is trying to speak "SiS". If its moved from one motherboard to another, say one that uses an Intel chipset, you need to change the IDE driver from SiS to Intel.

If you can, move the harddrive back to the old machine, and change the driver to windows default. Shut it down and move it back over. If you can't, you need to do a repair install, instructions are here.

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

All of this is true for SATA drive also, but the names are different. (meaning you might need to change from a Jmicron to Intel.) Follow the link that I provided and you should be back in business.

EDIT: It has nothing to do with the MBR or bios. (the mbr hasn't have any hardware data, just the locations of the OS(s) on the harddrive. Read my link.

Answer 2

If it's an IDE drive, make sure that you have the jumper set properly. If it's the only drive on the cable, set the jumper to master. If it shares a cable with a hard drive, set one drive to master, and the other to slave.

Also, make sure you hooked up the power connector.

As far as booting up from the hard drive, you should unplug all other hard drives in case they have already have a master boot record on them.

You'll need a master boot record and an OS in order to boot up off of the hard drive.

If it's not booting, boot up from your operating system's install disk and create a master boot record on the hard drive.

Even the motherboard chipset is plug and play. You don't need to install any drivers before you bootup a single drive in Windows, even if the motherboard has changed. I've done this 100 times. If you had a RAID array, that would be a different story. Apparently, it's a common misunderstanding. Some people think that your installation of Windows is tied to your computer's hardware, but it's not. If you have problems when Windows starts, just boot into safe mode, then install the drivers for your new hardware.

You need a master boot record (MBR) to boot off of the drive. The MBR stores the physical location of the OS, but it doesn't store any other hardware information. It does store some bootstrapping code, which depends on your CPU being the same architecture. For example, both computers have Intel compatible CPUs right? The other one wasn't a RISC or PowerPC CPU right?

Kudos to Jamie H below for giving more info about the hard drive jumper.

Answer 3

Mistradam is right although he didn't explain in very much detail on the back of the hard drive where the cable plugs in there will be a little pin called a jumper connecting pins together depending on what the harddrive was used for before going into your current pc then it may be set to 'slave' (secondary) harddrive meaning the PC will want a 'master' primary hard drive first you can normally check the pin configuration for the jumper on a picture somewhere on the harddrive.

If it was the case that it was a secondary harddrive it probably won't have an operating system loaded onto it, so you could try installing an operating system or as others have said windows may not load properly if it already had windows xp on because of the different hardware in which case you will have to reinstall xp or use the recovery console on the XP disk.

Answer 4

Windows OSes install specific hardware configurations into the MBR of an HDD to prevent this. If the OS was installed on the same PC then swapped out and later swapped in, it should work. Otherwise it won't. You can try boot from the Windows CD/DVD and running the recovery console and copy ntldr.dll to windows\system

Answer 5

Plain and Simple Not All Computers are interchangable. Sytems on AMD won't WORK on INTEL. And INTEL won't work on AMD. You will have to redo the operating system all over again. Both the hard drives are all reconized that they are there.

Each mother board has it own marking or trail that it makes like going to sites on internet you leave a mark from your computer (cookie),so that why they don't work together.

Answer 6

Hi. If the old drive has Windows XP installed it will look at your hardware and if it has changed a lot (which it will) the OS may refuse to boot. Try to reinstall the OS.

Answer 7

it could need you recovery cd that you got with it or that you made because of the hardware settings sometimes have to be inputed to the motherboard, if not then look up recovery on help and support from you old harddrive and it will tell you how to copy the partion onto a cdand when puting new one in you boot from the cd and start the recovery.

Answer 8

it will not run because your original hard-disk was programmed by your board and bios.. replacing it with another harddisk which already has operating system. that's a fact