Weird HDD problem...

[SickOfItAll]

Built myself a new computer awhile back - nothing fancy. One thing I neglected to do, however, was back up a lot of things I'd like (nothing immediately important, but still). So, rather than going back and doing it, the obvious solution is to pilfer the HDDs from the old PC (which is now gathering dust) and use them in the new box, as extra storage.

Therein lies the problem.

When I try to load the old HDDs, I always get the same error:

"The file c:\windows\system\hal32.dll is missing or corrupted. Please reinstall this file" (or something along those lines).

Now, I've set it in the BIOS to give boot priority to the main HDD. I've also set it to not attempt to boot off anything else - CDROM, nothing. But, I still get that error.

System specs:

Abit IC7-G
P4 3.0 ghz
1gb Kingston DDR333 RAM
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Lite-ON DVD & CD-RW drives

and the HDDs are:

WD 1200JB for the new main one that I'm using
2 IBM 120GXPs for the old ones I'm trying to load

Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[SickOfItAll]

bump??

 

[Ice Czar]

strange

make your System HDD (the one native to the computer)
the master on the primary IDE Channel, get it recognized and successfully boot to it.

then attach the old HDD to the secondary channel as a slave (with an optical as the master)

if that works, when you get into Windows (if the new drive is NTFS) you will need to disable simple file sharing and take ownership of the files and folders from the administrative account, since the permissions where set on a different OS

the BIOS typically employs the following order for boot scans
(without SATA bus Mastering Schemes thrown in and simplifying it to only one Primary and extended Partition per drive, which may or maynot be the case ) or at least through the first four after that, the list is more or less the lettering scheme employed

-- Primary Master primary partition
-- Primary Slave primary partition
-- Secondary Master primary partition
-- Secondary Slave primary partition
-- Primary Master extended partition with logical drives
-- Primary Slave extended partition with logical drives
-- Secondary Master extended partition with logical drives
-- Secondary Slave extended partition with logical drives
-- Removable media (CD-ROM) or other software driven devices with drive letters

that config should give you the maximum seperation