I'm Getting a Stop Error before Windows boots!!!

I would appreciate some help with my new system that I've just bought.

I have:

an AsRock K7VT4A+ motherboard
an AMD Athlon XP3000 processor
256Mb DDR RAM PC2700
a 12x DVD RW+/-
a Sony DVD ROM
a 256Mb GeForceFX5700 Graphics card
Onboard Audio/LAN

I bought all of this in the knowledge that I already have a 15Gb Seagate Barracuda IDE Hard Disk Drive as well as a Western Digital 80Gb IDE Hard Disk Drive at home.

Once at home I connected up the 15Gb HDD to the motherboard as the Master Drive (this drive already has Windows XP Pro installed on it and has been used with another PC until recently) and I also connected the 80Gb drive as a slave (this was used as a slave with the other drive in my old PC).

However, when I try to boot up instead of getting to windows I get the page which tells me that Windows could not start successfully - possibly because of a recent hardware change. I get options to start in safe mode, etc but I cannot move the curser around as the keyboard is not installed yet. So I can only select Start Windows Normally which happens when the counter reaches zero.

Windows then fails to start and I get a blue screen message. It's too long to write but I'll do it if it helps. Basically though it states that Windows has been shut down because of a problem detected. It suggests restarting and if the same error screen appears then check for viruses, remove any recently installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. It also says to check the hard drive is properly configured and terminated and to run chkdsk /F to check for corruption. There's some technical info at the bottom too.

It's too late to call the suppliers of the PC so was wondering if there is something glaringly obvious that I have not done or can do! To the best of my knowledge the Hard drives were virus free and in good order when I last used them and they have been stored in boxes in their anti static bags.

Please help the gingerninja!!

 

if you swapped a hdd from another machine that already had WindowsXP installed on it and you put it on a new machine that has a different motherboard then you WILL have problems.

You can run a REPAIR from the XP CD to see if it resolves the issue.