Move harddrive to new PC

[Outdoorxman]

I have a 30 Gig WD drive with XP Home loaded. I have
pulled it from my old PC and put it in my new PC because I
don't want to loose my installed programs.

The bios sees the drive correctly. When I boot it gives me
a message that the NTLDR is missing. I have tried running
the Repair option from Setup and that seems fine until I
reboot and get the same old error. I have tried booting to
the recovery console and running the fixboot and fixmbr
commands with no success. The drive only has one partition
and it is set active. I also upgraded the bios to the
latest right before the swap. I put the old existing
harddrive back in and it boots to it. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Alvin Brown]

Hello

You can not just do that, it willnot work and your going
to have problems, because your using 2 different hardware
devices. Best solotuon is to reload windows but in your case
you can do a Repair Install. ( That will only work if both pc
have the exact same harddware devices)

Do a repair install
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q315341&ID=KB;EN-US;Q315341



Alvin

 

[LVTravel]

You need to do a repair install (inplace upgrade) of Windows XP when you
place the drive in the new machine. Changing the hardware (motherboard,
bios, etc) prevents XP from loading.


See this KB article
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q315341&ID=KB;EN-US;Q315341

 

[Guest]

That I have done but I still get the 'missing NTLDR'
message when I reboot.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

Normally, and assuming a retail license (many OEM licenses are not
transferable to a new motherboard), unless your motherboard is
virtually identical (same chipset, same IDE controllers, same BIOS
version, etc.) to the one on which the other WinXP installation was
originally performed, you'll need to perform a repair (a.k.a. in-place
upgrade) installation, at the very least:

How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade of Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=KB;EN-US;Q315341

As always when undertaking such a significant change, back up any
important data before starting.

This will also require re-activation. If it's been more than 120
days since you last activated that specific Product Key, you'll most
likely be able to activate via the internet without problem. If it's
been less, you might have to make a 5 minute phone call.


Bruce Chambers

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[Peter Hutchison]

That I have done but I still get the 'missing NTLDR'
message when I reboot.

Boot off the XP CD and load Recovery Console and copy the missing
NTLDR program back from i:\386 folder on XP CD. also run Fixmbr as
well.

Peter Hutchison
Windows FAQ
http://www.pcguru.plus.com/

 

[thorny]

Was this drive originally upgraded to XP from Win98,
Win98SE, or ME? If so, have a look at this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-
us;314057

I ran into this myself today... I was able to get rid of
the "NTLDR is missing" error but ultimately I could not XP
to boot successfully.

Good luck...