Hard drive working, but not working??

[7blades]

hey all,

just tried using a harddrive from a friends computer which had broken down and put it into their new system. the harddrive wont boot up. it'l go into repair mode and act as if its ok but when i try to boot up again it just does nothing.

any ideas?

 

[Paperdoc]

Not sure if I understand what you say, but let's try. Is this what happened?

Your friend's computer broke down and he / she got a new one. You moved the old machine's hard drive into the new machine and then set the BIOS Setup screens to boot from that drive. But it won't do that.

IF that is the sequence, your problem is that the old drive has a custom version of Windows on it that includes all the device drivers for the hardware in the OLD machine, and does NOT have device drivers for all of the new machine's built-in devices. That is normal. Sometimes you can correct this problem if you have the Windows Install disk for the version of Windows already on the old HDD. You place the Install disk in the optical drive and boot from it as if you were going to Install, but do NOT do a normal Installation. Instead, early in the menu choices look for a REPAIR INSTALL option. Do that, acting on the old HDD. What this is supposed to do is survey all the drivers already installed on the old HDD, then survey all the hardware devices found in the machine that it's running on, and try to fix all the mis-matches. If it works, when you're done the new machine will be able to boot properly from the old HDD.

If I misunderstood the sequence and this is not your situation, do not bother with a Repair Install. Clarify what DID happen so we can try again to offer advice.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

What he ^ said