switching hard drive problem

[wetard1]

I just bought a new dell and I wanted to swap the Dell hard drive to my old hard drive. When I tried this the system just reboots itself with no error message. Anyone know what the problem is and what I can try to fix it?

I just read the "How to: Upgrade your motherboard without reinstalling Windows. " would this be a possible solution?

 

[Ice Czar]

that could be considerably clearer

have you cloned the drive?
are there 2 drives?
have you checked the jumper settings?
is it attached to the same channel (IDE0 or IDE1)?


its likely a boot order issue or you failed to include the MBR in the clone
but without more info...

simply put the the computer cant find the ntldr to boot for one reason or another

 

[wetard1]

Basically, what I want to do is take my hard drive from my old computer and put it in the Dell this way I don't have to reinstall everything. Then format the dell hd and use it as a slave drive.

 

[Ice Czar]

still not crystal clear
either

the old OS has different drivers
all those need to be stripped from the OS and then the harddtive transfered
this isnt all that hard but it is a bit advanced the migration tool Windows supplies is called sysprep, the mitigating factor that leads me to not recommend this for a novice is the Dell drivers
trying to track all those down will be a bitch, typically Dell employs a special restore partition instead.

You can do what your asking but its not nearly as easy as you imagine
there will be a steep learning curve

also it will need to be reactivated if its Windows XP

or

you need to clone the Dell HDD to the old HDD
and then set its jumpers to the same as the HDD its replacing and physically have it take its place on the config
(meaning if its the Master HDD on the Prinary IDE Channel the clone needs to replace it)

in the first senerio all your data is migrating to a new machine
in the second the new OS is migrating to the old HDD but in the new machine
since you dont want to reinstall everything Id guess the first applies
and simply put reinstalling everything is going to be easier for a novice

if you do elect to use sysprep
backup everything first
How to use the Sysprep tool to automate successful deployment of Windows XP
http://labmice.techtarget.com/windows2000/install/sysprep.htm

 

[wetard1]

I just read the "How to: Upgrade your motherboard without reinstalling Windows. " would this be a possible solution?

After reading that post I figured I probably had to use sysprep. Guess I'll give it a shot. I was kinda hoping that if I popped in my old hd that windows would auto detected everything. Thanks for the info.