I think my Hard Drives hate me =(

I have two Hard Drives, we'll call them A and B. They were both installed, A as master w/ Windows XP Home and B slaved, in my computer. Both worked fine with no problems or complaints. I then received a new computer as a gift from a friend, it's slightly better than my old one, but I wanted to keep my files, so I removed A & B from the old computer and put them into the new one.

The (new) computer repeatedly reaches a screen asking if I want to "start Windows normally" and no matter what I do (choose safe mode, choose start normally, do nothing) the computer resets and the whole process starts over. I thought a Windows repair install might fix things so I placed the XP CD in the drive but the computer kept freezing on the main setup screen where it asks u to choose between installing or the recovery console.

I next attempted to do a repair with only A installled and B left unplugged. This time it didn't freeze but when I pressed R for the recovery console, it said that it did not find any hard disk drives installed. I realize this might indicate impending hard disk failure, so on a lark I tried something. I unplugged A and plugged in B (the drive w/o XP) and when i pressed R it again gave me the same message. Is it really likely that BOTH drives are failing, considering I had no prior problems or issues?

I next went and put A back into my old computer, and now that one isn't recognizing my Hard Disk either. When I tried putting both in again, it said something about not recognizing the secondary one, yet booted up and once in Windows I was able to see and use both drives. What's going on here? Any ideas? I'm really at a loss as to what I should do.

All I did was literally move the hard disk two feet from one computer to another, could I have really messed something up while doing that? Help please?

 

To update myself... I've discovered that the new computer was previously set up with it's hard drives in a RAID array. Might that explain the insanity that's occured? If so, now all I gotta figure out is what a RAID array is exactly, since I've only ever heard of it and I've been too poor to spring for it. =)

 

You cannot take out your hard drives from one computer and put in another unless the Motherboard is identical. The only way to solve this problem and save all your data as i assume that is what you intend to do is to have another hard drive ( a third) and install an OS on it, then slave one of your original hard drives and drag the data from that to the OS HD.. Then you can format that old HD, (the one from where you have just dragged the data from) then set it to master and install an operating system on there, slaving the other you have borrowed/used and Format that. Finally Slave your remaing HD ( from old computer) and you should be OK. Hope this is clear enough.