Hard drive wont boot up on differnet computer

i am trying to boot from a hard drive out of my old compaq that i put into a dell that has no operating system on it. my compaq drive has XP black on it. i set the compaq to master and the other to slave. when i boot up it wont start. am i doing something wrong?

I can think of a few things:

1. You have the jumpers on the IDE HDDs improperly set or the BIOS doesn't like Cable Select mode. Explicitly set the HDD jumpers to Master and Slave.
2. You forgot to define the Compaq's HDD as #1 in the BIOS HDD boot sequence.
3. You forgot to properly plug in a data or power cable to the HDD, or it is loose.
4. You accidentally nuked the bootloader or there is some other software problem that prevents that computer from booting the OS on the HDD.
5. The Dell has defective hardware that won't let it boot.

If you put the Compaq's HDD back in the Compaq, I would expect it to work. Put it in the Dell and go into the BIOS and see if/where it shows up in the boot order.

If I understand you correctly, you have an old hard drive with an old OS with some hardware drivers for specific components that are installed in your old Compaq.....and now you put it in a new system with completely different hardware and expect it to boot ? It ain't happenin'.

As the system tries to boot hardware drivers for the old system are trying to load and then saying "what the hell ?" There ain't no [insert Compaq chipset] here why the hell am I trying to load [insert Compaq chipset] drivers ? It's looking for a CPU that isn't there, specific RAM that isn't there and a bunch of other stuff that isn't there.

You want to install an old HD in a new machine and have it boot, then you gotta format the bugger and install the OS fresh on it....so windows can load drivers for the specific components that it detects on the Dell.

Yes. I think you can bring up just the boot menu if you hit F12, but it's been a while since I have had to muck around in the BIOS of my Dell laptop.

You're trying to boot to a drive with NO O/S ON IT?

I hope that was a typo, because there's no way you can boot from any device without an O/S installed on it.

F2 is the correct to enter Dell's BIOSes on newer computers. Where am I getting it from? How about Dell themselves? Or I can take a video of me hitting "F2" at the POST screen of my Latitude E5400 and show that it enters the BIOS setup?

Yes, except that unlike most PCs, Dell PCs use a custom BIOS written by Dell rather than a version of an American Megatrends (AMI) or Phoenix BIOS. Thus it is not surprising they use a different key to enter the BIOS setup.

In the future, please read up on the topic and find out what the correct answer actually is before jumping in a discussion and basically calling those who do have the correct answer idiots. Also, if you would have read the entire thread, you would have heard that the hard drive in question has Windows XP on it; it is NOT blank.