Resolved Redefining partitions

Background:
I was installing a new powersupply on my old PC running XP-Home.
Somehow I killed the CPU. My brother-in-law has an old/unused PC (but newer) also running XP-Home. Both have IDE drives. He gave me his PC. I swapped in my IDE drive as a slave. It came up OK, but the Drive ID's are all shifted up.

My drive will not bootup his PC as the M/B's are different.

He has only a large C: partition. I have 4 partitions.
My C: became D:, D: became E:, E: became J: and F: became K:

So none of my installed s/w will come up properly, as the drive ID's are all different. All of my executables are on my C: (now D: ) with various data files on D: (now E: ) and F: (now K: ).

A few apps came up in virgin condition, and even though I tried to redirect them to the proper drives, most of their configuration files could not be found or redirected, especially Firefox and Thunderbird. So I cannot get into my mail. (and I cannot remember my passwords, natch.)

I do NOT want to re-install the s/w, that is a near impossible task.

Is there any way to redefine the drives back to their original ID's?
How will this affect my brother-in-laws old C: drive and it's boot sector?

I will check back here every few hours as I cannot get an email notification.

 

Thank you Steve;

I will attempt the "Failed Motherboard" fix, probably tomorrow when my thinking is clearer.

There is a wrinkle between the 2 systems.
My older system has 2 IDE ports supporting the HD, CD-RW and a DVD-RW (3 devices).

The newer system has only a single IDE port, which had the HD and a DVD-RW.

To get the system running with my HD, I had to swap the DVD connection to my HD (as a slave). So there is NO DVD/CD support at this time on the newer system, which is required for the "Upgrade Motherboard" process.

 

Yes, I realize that.

Right now I need to know if the system will bring up the NVIDIA card on the new MB, as the old system has an ATI (AGP) card in it, and is not transferable to the new MB. And I do not have the NVIDIA install CD.

Plus I am seriously considering installing a 1TB SATA HD as primary, bring up my XP on it, then mirror over the IDE HD. My concern here is overwriting the registery and WINDOWS sub.dirs.

 

Many thanks.
Will get them a little later.

 

I got the system up and running finally after almost 3 weeks of grief.

Please note: The MS "Failed motherboard" fix DID NOT. In fact it made things far worse by installing incompatible drivers, then giving me repetitive but different BSOD on reboot. All related to drivers. Each one I fixed (which took almost an hour each) unearthed another BSOD. I gave up. I even tried reinstalling Win XP but that made everything on that drive unusable if it was set as master.

I am now running the "new" HD as master and my old HD with the fried boot sector as a slave and I am laboriously moving stuff over and reinstalling as needed.

So, case closed.