hard drive replacement, disk boot failure

My old hard drive was starting to bite the dust. I had been getting error messages while trying to play mp3s for a couple days. I ran chkdsk /f and saw there were some bad sectors. I got a new hard drive and copied over what I could, then removed the old drive. When I tried to boot up again I got the Disk Boot Failure Please INsert System Disk message.

Few details, old harddrive was ATA/100, new one is SATA. When I first built the system I had similar problems. The configuration is a little weird: i.e. the disk with /Windows is d: and the drive I removed was c:.

I tried putting the drive back in, but that did not fix the problem. I've played with the boot priority, and tried booting from CD without success. I do not have a boot floppy I'm afraid, and won't be getting one anytime soon as this pc is a shuttle sff with no floppy drive. Any ideas?

go back into your bios set it to boot from cdrom, if it let you select it according to model number pick your cd or dvd drive that the window xp or 2k or vista disk is in, exit bios saving settings, when it comes after rebooting, and ask yhu to press any key to load from cdrom, do it,
once window gets to the point it ask you where you want to load windows, tell it to create a new folder, do not, and i mean do not create a new partition or format your hard drive or all your song will be gone, this should get you back up and running.

welcome