Hard Drive and Boot Disk Failure

Hi, my friend is having problems with her computer. It is a Windows XP Professional. This is the situation.

My friend has another computer who's onboard video card wasn't working and she really wanted to get into the computer to save the documents she had created. This works on Windows 98. Since the onboard video card is damaged, and installing a new video card didn't work, she decided to try and take out the hard drive and install it onto her newer computer which carries Windows XP Professional.

She switched the drives, unplugged the connection from the drive in her new computer and hooked up the older drive with all her documents.

She gets a boot disk failure and tries to fix it with a bootable disk for Windows 98 since her old drive carries Windows 98. Either way, it didn't work, so she re-plugged her drive from the Windows XP computer back into it's connector and tries to reboot.

She gets the same message for this drive and thinks she might have messed up the computer by switching drives back and forth.

So basically, after switching back, she gets the same boot disk failure, insert boot disk. Please let me know how she can fix this, so she can go back into her Windows XP computer. Thank you.

Camila

 

With the XP Hardrive do the following.

1. Turn on the computer and put in your Windows XP Disc
2. When it show "Boot from cd." on your screen press "enter" on your keyboard
3. Then let the computer do its on thing, it loads of bunch of things.
4. When that finished press "R" to enter the Recovery Console.
5. Once there it will ask for password...
6. Now a command prompt should be available. I.E. "C:\WINDOWS\"
7. Type "FIXMBR" then press enter
8. Type "FIXBOOT" then press enter
9. Type "EXIT" then press enter

Now your computer will be rebooting and should hopefully load your Windows XP

 

When you try to boot the computer from the HD does it show that the HD has been seen by the computer.

You probably need to identify the HD in the BIOS or perhaps the ribbon is not hooked up correctly to the drive. The ribbon has one edge that is colored, usually red, this edge of the ribbon would be closest to the power connection on the HD. Also make sure the multicolored power plug is inserted all the way. If it seems not to be going in as far as it should you may have it backwards.