XP OS on Two Hard Drives In Same Computer

[Margarie]

I bought a new computer with windows XP and I want to take the hard drive from my old computer with XP and put into the new computer. However, it will not boot. Is there a way to have the new computer to recongnize the old harddrive?

 

[franklin97355]

Make sure the new HD is set as master and the old one is slave or on the secondary IDE controller. You should be able to read the information but not run programs on the old drive.

 

[micker377]

XP doesn't allow you to set up a boot hard drive on one computer and have it boot on another system. Different drivers and all that.

 

[dcs97]

By "it will not boot" do you mean that the HDD is not recognized or that it "blue screens" when you try to boot. If it blue screens (most likely problem) it is because the HAL is different from one machine to the next, XP is very hardware sensitive. What you have to do to correct this is do an XP overlay which will install the proper HAL for your new MOBO etc. To do this you boot your XP CD and choose to install XP (not the repair using the recovery console) You will then be given a choice of either installing a fresh copy of XP or reparing a previous version. Choose the repair, it will remove your old HAL and replace it with the new. That should solve it.