Exchanged hd, will not boot.

I put my hard drive, Quantum Fireball 30gb ltc 15, from my 333MHz system into a newer 733MHz system. The 733 will not boot to the operating system. It will disply the boot options screen; safe mode, last known good config., normal. Any selection i make it will restart into the same boot options screen and will not boot to the operating system. My OS is XP Pro.
How can i use this drive "as it is" without doing a reinstall ?

 

I'm not quite sure I understand fully. Is this new hard drive you're putting in this 733, the one with the operating system? If so... you're going to have to do a system repair, by booting to the cd... then choosing install...and at the next screen choosing repair.

 

Did the new computer come with a HDD and OS? If so, there may be a different approach. If not, do what Dazy said.

If it came with an OS, post which one.

Martin

 

More questions I'm afraid.
Is the hard drive you put in the only hard drive, or did you put it in as a secondary? If a secondary, you may have both drives set to master and it doesn't know which to boot from. Set the jumpers on the drive connected to the middle connecter of ribbon cable to slave and try again.

 

You're trying to do the impossible with XP - when you try to boot the new PC, you've effectively changed ALL the hardware (except the HD of course) that the O/S knows about. As you say, even safe mode didn't work, and that uses only basic generic drivers. The only chance you have (if you intend this to be a permanent swap, and want to avoid reinstalling apps etc.) is to install XP to the same folder (WINNT?) that the original install used, so it picks up the registry. It'll be a one-way operation. No other kind of repair has a hope of working.

 

Hi.

Rambler hit a home-run. It even goes deeper tho.

The best thing to do is back up your data and reinstall everything. However, if you really really really have to keep the hdd as it is and not reinstall everything then put the hdd back into the old system even if you have to reinstall the old motherboard.

Boot up and back up all the data you can. Make a directory and copy ALL the XP cdrom into that folder on the hdd. Then try again. This time boot from the cdrom and be sure to sequence to the repair instead of new install.

After XP does the initial file dumping on the hdd to get into repairing it will reboot. At that point your system will probably NOT recognize the cdrom. When it asks for files from the XP cdrom you can redirect it to the folder on the hdd. This is what trips most everybody up. Without the cdrom you're just stopped cold. Even if you still have the original cdrom installed, the ide drivers will be different and probably won't work at all. You really need XP on the hdd.

Hope this helps.

Giles