Does my idea sound as stupid to you as it does to me?

Ok, so im dealing with not being able to boot from the cd and because of this im not able to reinstall windows. See thread here for more info. http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1031963857#post1031963857

Here is my stupid idea. Can i install windows on the HP pavillion hard drive by plugging it into my main computer? Running the install program etc. then just plug the pavillion hard drive in the the hp? Can this possibly work? I think i read somewhere that windows wont work if the hardware changes.

EDIT... nevermind... delete this post... sorry.

Just quick question, have you tried a different bootable cd? like memtest. If it wont boot on a different disc than there's something with it not saving the bios settings. Is there a cdrom bootable and a different boot order option?

Just things to rule out.

Ya XP doesn't like it when you switch boot drives between computer with different motherboards. It's possible to fix it but it's requires a silly amount of tinkering to do it. It's always just better to do a straight install

Woot i got it. All i had to do was put in an old lite-on cd drive on the unused slave port on ide 1. Then it detected the cd and everything is fine. How weird is that. For some reason you cant boot off either of the 2 cd drives that came with the comp but i put in some random one and it works fine.

wedoe21 said:

Woot i got it. All i had to do was put in an old lite-on cd drive on the unused slave port on ide 1. Then it detected the cd and everything is fine. How weird is that. For some reason you cant boot off either of the 2 cd drives that came with the comp but i put in some random one and it works fine.

Click to expand...

Are they SATA optical drives (the ones that came with the system)? If so the SATA ports those drives are attached to need to be in IDE native mode, not SATA/AHCI mode........... otherwise they don't like to be bootable............ drove myself insane figuring this out after upgrading to SATA opticals on my 965P-S3 board............