old hard drive wont boot?

if theres files on ur hdd that u cant live without then, what u could do is put everything back the way it was, then get an iomega zip drive, or other way to back up ur old files. u may have a floppy drive too.

get ur old files onto some new media

cd drive - cd

zip drive - zip disk

floppy drive - floppy disk

WHAt Operating System are u upgrading too?

Put the drive in another computer as the slave, copy the files you want and a clean install of Windows in the upgraded machine. Depending on how much data you want to save you could back it up on CDs or DVDs

Thank you for all the help so far!
I realize about copying the files etc... but the main thing is he dosent want to re-install any "Programs" that are already on the old drive.
The new drive will be a dual boot: 120gb WinXP and around 35gb for Vista Business (too play around with until it gets more stable, Via and Nvidia drivers freeze it up)

I have done a clone of a drive before and it worked fantastic, but have heard of real disasters, also so he dosent really want to lose anything, he teaches, mainly school files....
Just cant understand why one Seagate drive works fine, the old one dosen't, can't be a hardware incompatibility, right?
Thanks again everyone!

It will be that Windows is expecting to find some hardware but it's not doing so because it's a new machine.

The only thing I'd suggest is to take a complete copy of the disk so that you can't lose anything, then use the "Repair" option on your Windows XP disk.

I tried Fixboot and Fixmbr on the old drive, still wont boot into windows, think I am going to try and "ghost" the drive to a new one.

I don't mean "use the repair console", I mean "choose a repair install".

What exactly is that?
Is there a chance of messing up the partition or losing any files?
Thanks again

keep going in the installation procedure until it finds your current installation, then it will ask you if you want to repair it or reinstall, choose repair. I goes through the entire installation process, reinstalls drivers, windows components etc., but you do not lose any data or installed programs. You will need to reinstall your gfx drivers.

As someone has already said, you cannot replace the motherboard and CPU and then expect the copy of windows installed for the old motherboard and CPU to work. Even if it appeared to work you simply could not count on Windows to work reliably under those circumstances. Consider yourself lucky that you're getting an obvious error which forces you to correct this.

When Windows installs it detects the hardware you have and configures the appropriate drivers to use that hardware. Doing the "repair install" will cause Windows to re-detect the hardware and reconfigure the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). Here's a link to a MS Knowledge Base article on how to do a "repair install". If you spend some time with Google you can turn up other descriptions on how to do this.

-john, the ostensibly clueless redundant legacy dinosaur

Unfortunately, you will also need to run Windows update and re-install all Microsoft fixes to date. (Hopefully your install copy of XP includes SP2 so at least you won't need to install that as well).

But as "cutthroat" said, at least all your installed programs and Windows configuration should be preserved.

-john

Thanks all of you!
I had really forgotten about the full "repair" thing, always heard it was not good too use that, ok for Fixmbr etc.... but full repairs usually messed things up worse.
I am doing the repair now, let ya know how it works, thanks again everyone for all the help!

Thats right, just dont use the repair console! I remember now lol....
Let it go through, detect the installed win setup and then hit r....

Thanks, especially cutthroat, he explained it all, just didnt pay attention, didnt hit me in da brain untill just now...  

Forums, the best place to find out anything you need to know, thanks to people like you that take the time to help people like me.
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