The other day I took my friends hard drive home with me to erase the drive and put a new OS on it, I did this using my computer, after I was done I made sure everthing worked fine, it did. Now, I try to put this drive back in my friends computer and it won't boot past POST. I checked the bios and IT DID recognize the drive, but it won't boot. I went and put this drive back in my computer and it works fine. Now I took another hard drive and put it in my Friends computer to verify it's not a bad hard drive controller, the drive works fine in it. Can anyone tell please tell me why his hard drive which I prepared on my computer will not work in the original (his)computer anymore. Thanks (the jumpers are set correctly)
First off, I'd try booting with a boot disk and see if fdisk can see the drive. If so, make a primary partiton, make it active and format it with format /s. Then try to boot from the hdd and see what happens.
Fixed it Learned something new today, how I missed this I don't know. I cannot take someone elses hard drive and load an OS using my computer and then put it back in the original computer and expect it to run. The reason being is that when the OS loads in my computer it's loading all the device drivers for my specific computer, when I put this drive in his computer nothing is recognized. Makes sense and I am sure most people knew that, kinda hurt the ego though. Anyway it works fine now. Thanks for the help.
You are not the only one. Instructor in computer tech school, teaching advanced repair. We used norton ghost to clone a machine with windows 2000 pro on it. Every computer was exactly the same, execpt the BIOS. The ghosted image deployed just fine, but windows refused to boot We had to check our BIOS and find that setting, once it was changed to how it was on the source machine, it worked. Windows 9x can be transplated, because it just goes ahead and detects the new hardware and asks for drivers, reboots and you done. Windows NT 2k and Xp however wont let this happen, probably for security reasons. At least you caught it
I've actualy done this successfuly before with xp home What you do is boot to "safe mode" -> start -> control pannel -> system -> hardware -> device manager. And from there, uninstall everything! When it asks you to reboot, say no, and just keep uninstalling. Though you WILL have to re-register windows xp if you do this. And it's not guaranteed that it will work either.
