Migrating a system disk from one system to another

[bobh]

Hi,

I just assembled the following:

Case ANTEC Sonata III
Motherboard Gigabyte EP45-UD3P
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (dual-core)
Ram Crucial 4096MB (4GB) PC8500 DDR2 (about 3.00GB usable)
Video Card Radeon HD 4650 DVI using a DVI to VGA adapter
(This is a PCI Express 2 16 bit card)
Hard Drive Western Digital 640GB 7200rpm SATA
DVD RW LG Internal/GH24 Serial ATA

The hard drive I am using is a pre-existing system swapped out from my older Antec box. I was tuning it in preparation for running it on my new system.
The disk is a SATA drive so there is no master slave per/se. My BIOS settings
tell me that I have two SATA drives: 0 is my DVD drive and is a master, the
Hard Drive is 1 and is also designated a master.

At boot time, I get the preliminary Windows menu asking me if I want to proceed with booting (Safe, Normal etc.) so I presume I am beyond any problems with BIOS settings and I am seeing Microsoft logic running from a boot sector. However when I proceed the system tries to boot and but then forces a reboot, back to BIOS. This repeats any number of times. Booting
in Safe mode shows the same problems.

Just to make sure there wasn't a hardware problem I put in a Linux rescue CD which I use to clone disks and the rescue disk launched correctly and booted a Linux OS. It seems to be functioning okay.

So my problem seems to be related to Windows booting and software. Note that because it is a different system the video cards are different. I'm not sure whether that is a problem.

Suggestions?

Thanks,

Bob

[The Wise Monkey]

Which OS are you using? If you have moved the hard drive from one PC to another, then you will probably need to run a repair of the operating system. You can do this (with XP) by booting from the original OS install CD, and continue as if you are about to install fresh i.e. don't enter the recovery console. It will search for existing OSs and will allow you to repair the core Windows files. This should allow you to access everything again.

This process doesn't affect any installed applications or any other data, so that should be fine. It is probably worth using the Linux CD to create a backup though.