XP Boot Hang

I have a hard drive that came out of an HP pavilion xt963 (mobo/bioschip failure) that I am trying to install in a Compaq Presario. The drive itself is not booting properly.

On boot it will go to safe mode menu.

If I select start in Safe mode it starts to load and locks up on c:\windows\system32\whatever... first it was agpsys.. (I no longer can remember the name). I read that I could disable the service to the file and it would boot. So I disabled this in recovery console. It locked on the next file. I disabled the next service. Still locks on whatever the last file is before loading safe mode.

If I try to load normally or last known good configuration then it locks and nothing happens.

I tried using the HP restore cd's that came with the orginal PC and has XP on them but they will not work in this compaq.

I can boot to a xp home cd and get into recovery console. I don't want to reload for 2 reasons.
#1 Won't I get the error that it cannot load from xp cd due to the HP restore feature?
#2 I will, of course, lose all data...not that its worth anything right now...

If I press F10 on boot to try to get to restore I get the message
couldn't open drive multi (0) disk(0)rdisk
NTLDR couldn't open drive multi(0) disk(0) rdisk(0) partition (1)

drive is setup as follows:
_:\ EISA utilities 4511 mb (827 mb free)
C:\ partition 2 (HP_pavilion) NTFS 33643 mb
unpartitioned space 8 mb

Any suggestions would be GREAT!!!

 

Welcome to the BBS madchick!
It was never meant to work. A HD with an OS from one system will very rarely work because most of the hardware (particularly the motherboard) is different. The OS has loaded drivers and various settings pertaining to the motherboard of the original install. The new motherboard can be vastly different. So on a new system the OS will crash out. The best (and recommended) option is to boot from your install CD, delete the partition, recreate a new partition and reformat, then reinstall a fresh copy of XP. Or don't delete and recreate the partition, but reformat the existing and reinstall.

Your second option that may work, is to boot from the install CD and do a repair install of XP. This should (will?) reload all your motherboard and hardware drivers pertaining to the new M/B etc but retain your current settings and programmes. A search of this XP forum or a google for repair install will give you directions.

The restore CD's from the original PC won't work for the same reasons outlined above.

HTH