I tryed taking the hard drive out of my dell and putting it in my compaq. I took out the old one inserted the new one following some steps I found online. When I boot my pc with the one I connected a blue screen flashes for a second then the windows xp loading screen flashes for a second. After that the computer restarts and repeats the same thing. Anyone know the problem? please help me get this hard drive running. Help is greatly appreciated.
Its probably because of particular chips on the motherboard of your two pcs. If the chips are different in each pc then you wont be able to use windows from one pc in the other. The solution is to reinstall windows which usually on computers from people like dell involves having to backup your data. (or at least it did in the past when ive had those system restore disks) If you have a bought copy of windows xp it is possible to reinstall windows without backing up your data. What are the models of the two pcs? If it turns out the chips (northbridge and southbridge or the chipset for short) are the same then it might well be something else.
Its unlikely to have any other reason but still check the pins of ur HDD if there is any bent or something...
or you could find your XP CD key (on XP CD or in the registry, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion) then borrow an XP CD and reinstall XP without formating[ot]drivers and some software will probably need reinstalling too[/ot] BTW: it is legal
