Installing a XP hard drive instead of Windows 98 hard drive.

Hey everybody,
Ive got a Windows 98 tower with a 750 MHz motherboard, 160 Mb of SD RAM. Is it possible to swap out the 98 HD with a HD with XP Home on it? I tried, but it wont work. After I turn it on, it beeps once, then goes to a blank with a blinking cursor that looks like this ( _ ) in the top left. Any suggestions on how to get XP on there without replacing everything? Thanks in Advance!

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major
If the HD with Windows XP on it was previously in a PC that does not have EXACTLY the same hardware as the PC you're trying to run it on, then it will not boot to a desktop and will crash, usually to a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) error but it may flash by too quickly to read or even be noticed. However, from your description, it doesn't seem like the system is even getting that far. The first thing I'd do is check the BIOS and make sure it's recognizing the hard drive correctly. If it is, then it could be that the partition has been set as 'inactive' somehow, or maybe the boot sector or boot record has been fouled up. If you have the XP installation disc, the best course of action would be to either boot to the Recovery Console and run some disk error checking/repair using chkdsk /r, rebuild the boot record and boot sector using fixmbr and fixboot respectively, or simply perform a safe Windows repair installation. There's an easy to follow guide at this link.
Good luck! I hope this helps!

[dlb]

- I strongly recommend that you research the commands I mentioned above and the Recovery Console in general before doing anything to avoid possibly making the situation worse; the same applies to the repair install: read through the steps at the link I provided so your aware and familiar with the process; here's some other good links:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490876.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324465 (includes a web cast video, and a written version, and a PowerPoint version)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291980
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/228004 (written for Win2000, but a lot of this applies to XP also)
So, there's some resources. Searching around at the Microsoft Knowledge Base and/or the Microsoft TechNet should provide you with more than enough info to get the job done.

 

ok, ill try it out, thanks. ill post up how it works.