Failed HDD Transport

[Vyper]

I often read the [H]OCP Articles, and lurk on the forums, and how fitting is it that when I finally have a problem I cannot solve, I come here, to garner the wisdom of the Hard members? Here is my situation: So I was trying to do a little HDD transplant yesterday, and ran into a snag, and I can't figure out what the deal is. I was working on an older Hewlett Packard, and attempting to pull the Seagate 60GB IDE/ATA HDD out of it, and then place it in a newer computer, that I built, and I had a 120 GB Western Digital IDE/ATA HDD in it, and it was working fine. So I put the Seagate in the newer computer, try to boot to Windows: no windows. Keeps kicking me out to the screen that says "Didnt start sucessfully, start in Safemode or regular and try again?". So I pull the drive out, check the cables/jumper settings, and try again. Still no go.

Im getting rather pissed off by now, so I take the WD 120 GB, and put it back in my comp, and it boots fine. I pull the Seagate, and try it again, still no go. So I switch the jumpers, and slave the Seagate to my WD, then try to boot, and still it wont, with the WD as the master! So im starting to worry about the integrity of the Seagate drive, so I put it back in the HP, and it boots fine, WTF?!?!

Im at a loss why the Seagate will boot in the HP, but not my custom built system? This is my older system mind you, its specs are:

1 GB of Ram
AMD Athlon 2600+
Radeon 9700 All-In-Wonder
WD 120 GB HDD

the HP has

768MB Ram
Some 1.1ghz proc, cant remember
Bad fx card
Seagate 60Gb HDD

Both are running/have installed Windows XP, and both original drives work just fine in their respective/native systems, but when I swap, that damn Seagate won't boot in my comp.

-Vyper

 

[Sieravor]

It could be that one HDD has software installed that is dependant upon the configuration of the other system. I know that when Windows loads the chipset drivers if it detects a problem it'll boot to safemode so it can be fixed. I'm betting it's nothing major, just a boot-time config issue.

 

[Machinehead]

I think the problem is that the windows install on the Seagate drive is configured for the hardware in the HP machine, taking that drive and putting it in another machine and expecting it to load wont work, different hardware. A solution would be to do a repair install, but the best solution is a fresh install of windows.

I hope this helps