Hi---- I think you may need to set your drives up with jumpers....if you have, please take a minute to check them, and all the tips I give, OK? We very often get questions about drives and not booting...so, bear with all the info, and do check inside- very easy to get something wrong.
Following: Most common configuration of drives.
1. What drive are you trying to "boot"? That drive must be the Master Primary IDE device, and contain Windows. It also shoud be jumpered as the Master on the Primary IDE channel of the motherboard (they are labelled). EXCEPTION: Some brands of hard drives, must be jumpered as a SINGLE drive- the diagrams are on the drive label. If there is another drive or CD drive on the same channel and cable....they would be SLAVE and the main hard drive is Master.
2. If using the newer 80-wire IDE cables with one blue connector at the end, that must go down onto the motherboard.
3. The CDR or CDRW drive should be set as a Master on the 2ndary IDE port and so jumpered.
3. You can leave the old messed up drive as is and set it as a SLAVE, with jumpers, and pull files from it.
4. You need to visit the BIOS, to make sure they auto detect correctly, they usually will, but not if jumpered wrong.
5. For the new drive- is it set up as one large partition? Did it configure correctly, with almost the same size in Megabytes that it is supposed to be? The drive formatted OK? Installing Windows onto it should make it bootable. Your old drive, if put in as a Slave, will become D: and the CD drive should move one letter ahead, unless you divided the drive into more partitions....in which case, each one needs to be formatted as you did before installing Windows to C:, that is, each other drive or partition on the new hard drive must be formatted, even if empty for now. Hope this helps----hope I did this right, and didnt skip anything too important. Hey, it's Friday....