swap HD, won't boot

[John Smith]

I removed the boot drives from an HP and an IBM computer. I then
put the HD from the HP in the IBM computer. It won't boot. The IBM
computer, having only one HD, gives an error message "no operating
system found..." If I put the drives back to their original
systems, they all work. What gives?

 

[Rich Barry]

John, drives with Operating Systems on them are not interchangeable. It
has to do with the HP drive looking for all the HP devices in the IBM
computer and vice versa. Basically It's like swapping wives. A lot
of adjustments have to be made before they work if ever.

 

[Sean Bolster]

There could be several reasons for this error. The driver issue can be overcome
but it is not even getting that far. I would boot to a recovery console with
a windows xp cd(if you have it and it shold match the version you have.)
there are several command you can try. The first would be to rename the boot.ini
to something like boot.old. You may have to use the attrib -h -r commands
on the file.

Once you've renamed the file you can run the bootcfg /rebuild


you can also try the fixboot command.


Hello Rich,