Upgrading by Moving a Hard Disk to a faster PC

S

subwoofer

Geek Trainee
Dear All

My first posting!

I am trying to upgrade PC hardware without having to reinstall the whole PC. I have done this by using Ghost to clone the original drive in a Compaq Deskpro EP. This cloned HDD works perfectly in the Compaq.

When fitting this HDD into an unbranded PC it just gives "error loading operating system". The original disk that was in this PC boots perfectly.

Is there something I can do, perhaps a simple CMOS setting or jumper, to fix this problem? Is there something special about the way the Compaq uses the disk?

It is worth some effort as the configuration of the old PC will take a long time to reinstall.

Thanks for your help.
 
When changing over to a PC, the one thing that you need to keep in mind is that the hard drive controller is probably not the same. This creates an issue as this is the anchor point for the OS on that hard drive. While the drivers may very well be on that hard drive, parts like the CPU aren't available to process this, and Windows can't boot.

Basically, you're best off to back up and do a clean install on the new system.
However, if you absolutely cannot do this now, you can try removing all the devices under Device Manager, shut down the old PC, then install the drive on the new rig and let Windows autodetect it.

This isn't always a surefire fix, as Windows still may not play nice, but if you absolutely cannot spend the time now, that might hold you off for a while. Eventually, and sooner than later, you're probably going to want to go ahead and reinstall Windows, particularly if you're dealing with Windows 9x.
 
It is running Windows XP prof. Is it still worth trying to remove all devices and then fit it into the new PC?

I did notice in the BIOS a setting with something to do with plug and play settings where it was set to not allow O/S plug and play. Might this be a factor?

Thanks
 
It's probably worth a shot first instead of reinstalling the OS. Just remember, at some point, it may be better to reinstall the OS than continue to haggle with your current situation.

The Plug-N-Play option is more of a legacy option. By default, XP uses a basic computer configuration (HAL-Hardware Abstraction Layer) that automatically assigns IRQs. While this has been present since Windows 95, the implementation was pretty pathetic, and users had to configure devices themselves on a not uncommon basis. The PnP BIOS option was there for allowing users to have the OS configure it or allow the user to configure it. XP (and 2000) ignore this option. However, if you run Linux or Win9x, you might still find this to be a useful option.
 
You can tell I'm not up to date on Linux. I did run across the need to configure PnP and IRQ's in BIOS when running Mandrake with a 2.4 kernel, and that had popped into my head.
 
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