Recover xp from old hard drive in new tower

V

VirginiaOh34

Hi all.
I put my old hard drive with XP Pro into a new system with Windows
Media edition on it. I changed the old drive to slave. First boot up
went fine - the old drive was accessable to view files.

I tried to reinstall Windows XP, from the disk, to create a dual-boot
system so that I could use all of my programs and access user
settings/passwords/etc from the old drive. Years of data. It did
create a second operating system, with the prompt to choose upon
start-up. However, I couldn't tell where it put the second os, and
none of the old settings were in effect.

I unplugged the new hard drive and booted up with just the old -
windows was not found to boot, so this tells me the installation
didn't make it to the proper drive, even though I was prompted where
to put it. I installed again onto the old drive. Now, SOME of my old
shortcuts have appeared on the desktop, but not all. All of my old
files in Documents & Settings are there - they weren't wiped by
Windows, but they're not being accessed.

Is there any way to fix this? I understand that having a whole new
tower makes Windows dizzy, trying to use all of the new devices. Is
there any way to access the original install of windows?

Also, is there any issue with drive letter names? Before unplugging
the new drive, when I viewed My Computer in the two os's, the drives
were assigned different letters. ?? Could this be due to the
driver's not being there for the usb ports/smart cards etc?

I'm slightly panicked as clients are cranky at the delay. I'd rather
fix this old drive than spend days reinstalling software, for now.

Notes:
I did not run the Settings Transfer wizard from the old drive before I
transferred. Idiot.
 
G

Guest

1st,you need to unplug "other" hds when installing the OS,once you have
the OS installed,replug in the others.2nd,more than likely youre xp install
did'nt work was youre trying to install from windows explorer,with a new
pc,you must boot to xp cd,select install xp,new copy,delete the
partition,create
one,then xp formats and install auto.In most cases,xp would have been
accessable (only) from WME,but not as an OS w/o doing the above......
 

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