I have tried to install my HDD to my sister's pc. Both
pcs are running XP. I want to take her harddrive out and
replace it with mine. I have connected it exactly the same
as the other one was with no success. Why doesn't it get
recognised if it was installed exactly the same
I have also connected it various ways such as switching
from master to slave as
well as changing the IDE port. In other words cable
connections and jumper settings are not the problem.
When the PC boots up I receive a blue screen saying
something like :
"windows has detected a virus, if you have
installed new hardware, remove it. If you have installed a
new Harddrive you should run Checkdisk /F."
Checkdisk has been run, Norton antivirus run and no
apparent problems with my Harddrive. Both Harddrives have
the same specifications - same brand and both 80Gb. I
don't want to format disks or anything like that. I want
keep everything on my HDD and just use it on my sister's
PC. Advice on this would be greatly appreciated.
There is a way to move XP hard drives around between different machines that
works maybe 90% or more of the time, and is not as intrusive as the other
suggestions in this thread.
Background:
XP is very brain dead when it comes to hardware swaps, compared to Win98.
You can generally take a Win98 bootable drive and move it around among
systems and it will at least boot to safe mode on a wide variety of
machines. You can generally work your way from there to a fully working
machine. Not so with XP. If you try to boot vanilla XP on different machines
you'll probably seem some nasty blue screens that seem like 100% road
blocks.
You may hear this balderdash that "MS did that for a reason so you can not
swap harddrive into another pc and expect it to boot up" which is clearly
not quite the truth. It's not quite the truth because this problem with XP
can and has been circumvented. At this point it appears that MS is too lazy
to ship a solution to problem that people in the field are resolving for
themselves.
For example, I had a client bring me a *name brand* laptop with
pre-installed XP on it. The machine had been drenched but not soaked with
water. The machine was dead but the hard drive was still alive. I put the
hard drive in a desktop and it booted, ran and came up to a desktop and
then automatically reconfigured itself to the desktop's hardware config. BTW
the laptop had an Intel chipset and the desktop had a SiS chipset. Other
than being roughly contemporaneous products they had very little in common,
hardware-wise. This shouldn't work!
I said to myself, "self, *name-brand PC's* tech staff knows what you know
about making XP boot on vastly different kinds of hardware". It simplifies
their tech support load, plain and simple.
So what is the secret to making XP boot on a variety of machines?
The Secret:
The answer starts with understanding why XP doesn't boot on a variety of
machines. The reason that XP from machine X won't boot on machine Y is
usually due to the fact that they have different hard drive controllers. One
machine has an Intel chipset, another has a Via, and a third has a SiS, a
fourth has a NVidia. The hard drive controllers are all different. This
leads to a variety of blue screens.
The rest of the machines are different in other ways, but it seems like that
if you can coax a machine to boot to a desktop, most of the other
differences will kinda sorta resolve themselves, perhaps with the help of a
driver disk. If you can get to some kind of a desktop, safe mode whatever,
it seems like you can bail water and get back on the road.
Basically the way you make XP boot on a variety of machines is to have a
common hard drive controller that you initially use to boot your drive on a
machine, a hard drive controller that is available on both machines. The
good news is that PCI dual hard drive controllers are readily available. XP
has the drivers for the Promise Ultra 100 built in. you can get Promise
Ultra 100 controllers lots of places for about $30. Other competitive hard
drive controllers such as those with the Silicon Image chipset don't have
their drivers built into XP, but you can load the drivers yourself, and they
can work as well.
Once you have your PCI hard drive controller you do the following which you
should review and understand before you start::
The step-by-step *Secret* procedure:
***ensure that all critical data is backed up on other media than the hard
drives that you are experimenting with***
(1) Add your PCI hard drive controller to your present machine. Boot XP and
ensure that the drivers for the hard drive controller are loaded by XP and
present in the device manager.
(2) Shut down the machine and move the IDE cables from the motherboard IDE
controller to the PCI IDE controller. Set the BIOS, if necessary to direct
booting off of the PCI controller. Boot the machine and ensure that it runs
properly.
(3) Shut down your present machine and remove the PCI IDE controller and the
hard drive.
(4) Install hard drive and the PCI hard drive controller in new machine. Set
BIOS of new machine to boot from the PCI hard drive controller if necessary.
Boot new machine. If this works and it works at least 90% of the time if the
machines are roughly comparable, the machine will boot and try to load the
drivers for the new motherboard. Use the CD or downloaded drivers for the
new motherboard to get the drivers for the new motherboard properly loaded.
Smart people copy all the drivers for the new motherboard onto the hard
drive while it is in the old machine.
(5) Once the drivers for the new hardware are loaded, you can shut down,
remove the PCI IDE controller and cable the new hard drive up to your new
motherboard. Reboot with just the new motherboard and you are done.
Closing comments:
If you have a number of machines with different motherboards, you can repeat
this process as desired to create an XP system that will boot on a wide
variety of disparate machines. Obviously, MS should make this part of the
standard XP product.
Obviously this procedure should not be used to violate licensing agreements.
If your XP system requires activation when there are significant hardware
changes, re-activation is still required.
