[sert]

Hey,

I recently upgraded several pieces of my hardware, mainly the motherboard, processor and RAM. The hardware itself all works fine but when I placed my old hard drives into the PC they refused to boot up any of the OS's I had installed. I had set up a dual boot system with Vista and XP but had been using Vista pretty much exclusively for the past year.

When I turned on the PC everything would seem ok. The hard drives were recognised and the boot menu would appear as normal, however no matter what selection I made to boot XP or Vista, even in the various Safe Modes the outcome was always the same. The startup screen would appear with the loading bar, freeze for a couple of seconds, flash blue screen and restart.

I have been able to get back onto the computer by making a fresh install of Vista onto a partition and all my files etc are still available, but it would really save me a world of hassle if I could get back onto my old Vista install which is still there, just refusing to boot.

Any ideas as to the problem and/or a solution?

[Elvandil]

Putting an OS in a different machine from the one it was installed in always leads to problems. The drivers are for the original machine. For XP, a repair installation may work and for Vista, running Startup Repair may work. But once you have a new machine, you sometimes need to install from scratch.

[sert]

Sadly I tried both those methods and it made no difference. I suppose in the long run it doesn't really matter, I still have my files. Its just a pain to have to go about updating and installing alot of software again.

[Elvandil]

You replaced so much that it is really no different than if you had taken out the hard drive and put it in a completely new machine. If you has Acronis True Image with Universal Restore, you could make an image of the original system and restore it to any other, completely different system. You could still do that by making images of the non-booting operating systems.

But there isn't much else you can do if the normal restoration attempts didn't work.

[sert]

Hmm, I'll probably just leave it. It'd be even more hassle to piece together the old parts just to be able to boot up and make the image than it is to restore my settings. Oh well, as long as I have all my files the rest is just an inconvenience. Thanks anyway.

[Elvandil]

You could make the image from your current installation with the boot CD, so it wouldn't involve setting things up the way they were before. But you're right that it is a lot of work if you can just start from scratch with a new setup, so long as you got your files.

[DonDodge]

You may try booting to the recovery console and running chkdsk with the parameter /r

I had a XP installation doing that after I moved the partition with Gparted and the grub bootloader couldn't get it going. It would reach the desktop stage with icons but before it got the norton, the firewall and other thing going, it would crap out and shut off. Running chkdsk like this worked for me