Help -changing ide to sata

[Guest]

my pc powered out and fried the motherboard,so i am trying to putt my hardrive into an old pc i have. I have changed from ide to sata using the connector which is allowing it to power up but wont boot - not sure what settings i should change in bios and auto-detect isnt picking up the hd but dvd/cd rom working fine. can anyone help?

 

[acer0169]

If you're running Vista, XP or any OS before XP then I'm not surprised it wont boot. You can't just install a hard drive with an OS on it into another computer and think it'll boot up. All the hardware has changed and even if you did get it to boot it would normally be painfully unstable.

 

[jitpublisher]

Exactly. You can't simply move a drive with a Windows installation from PC to PC. Unless the 2 systems are nearly identical, it usually won't even boot. If they are very close to the same, it may boot but then you are going to have activation problems, and still likely experience many bugs. You can usually solve the bugs with repair install, but activation on different machine is something you have to call and discuss with Microsoft, and obtain a new activation code for your OS.

 

[acer0169]

Just so people know.. with Win7 you can put an OS hard drive into a COMPLETELY new machine and it'll fire up. It'll take a couple of restarts and a new set of drivers installed, but it'll work fine. I know - I've done it twice now.

But yeah.. it sounds like you're probably on XP, swapped your drive, and now wondering why it doesn't boot. Answer is simple - it's still trying to boot a system that it's no longer plugged in to.