[Serge_N_Gin]

Hi all

I decided to help out an older friend upgrade their computer. I had an old tower lying around minus a Hard Drive, and I figured that I could remove my friends Hard Drive from his PC and pop it into my Tower and away he'd go!

Well, it didn't work. The PC seemed to boot fine and showed the initial text, but when it came to the Windows XP loading-part of the boot process, the monitor flashed white for a millisecond then went blank and the power light turned to amber, then off altogether.

I disabled my ATI Graphics card, then tried again with no luck so I looked in BIOS but couldn't get it to detect the drive which is a Seagate Barracuda 40GB drive.

I did however notice that the HD was listed as Secondary Slave. I was able to move it up to Primary Slave by moving the jumper but couldn't set it as Master. I even tried with the jumper removed. In fact I don't recall whether or not there was a Secondary Master .... there is a DVD/CD Combo drive installed so maybe that was set as Secondary Master? I'm afraid I can't remember.

I then tried connecting the HD to the same cable as the DVD/CD drive with no luck. The HD is an IDE and my original HD was also a Seagate IDE drive. Also FWIW, the last time I used my Tower with an IDE HD installed ( only months ago) it all worked perfectly.

After a few hours I called it a day

So, when I returned home I realised that the DVD/CD drive was probably throwing a spanner in the works and I should have unplugged it to see if that would get a result.

Finally it dawned on me that my friends internal HD would have all the drivers pertaining to his particular set up (Mobo, etc) but not the drivers for my mobo and maybe that's why Windows didn't boot up.

I'm left wondering if it's even possible to do what I'm trying to achieve, or would my friends IDE Hard Disc need to be wiped before installing it into my Tower?

I have the ABIT VIA-1.31M driver disc that came with my mobo, but don't really know where to go from here other than to try to install the drivers for my Mobo onto my friends HD before I remove it from his PC and install it in the one I want to give to him .... is this the right step?


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[CouchMaster]

90% of the time it won't work - if the new computer is nearly identical to the old one then it will work although you might have to run the repair function with your installation CD to rework different drivers. I have done it before with success but most of the time reinstalling is the better option.

[Serge_N_Gin]

Thanks for the reply CouchMaster, I don't know how different the two computers are or how to measure it other than I noted that my friends PC used DDR333 RAM and mine uses DDR400.

I think I will just try a different approach and work with what he has already. I just happen to have a DDR333 512MB RAM stick lying around which when added to his 256MB should make some difference for him.

I rang the local PC store and a DVD R/W drive only costs $46 so it's probably easier to upgrade his present set-up instead of going the way I started with.