Old hard drive to new pc

Moved 160-gb SATA drive with XP SP3 from old box to new box with Gigabyte MA785GM-US2H motherboard. Booting brings up the start-option screen, but it is stuck on the "start windows normally" selection (arrow keys don't work), and this brings up a BSOD with STOP: 0x0000007B.

I also partitioned and formated in hpfs a new 500-gb SATA drive and restored my old-system backup to it. Same result.

Tried a clean install of XP, but the installer found no drives on my system.

 

First off, You can't just pull a drive and out of one machine and put it in another and have windows boot correctly. The old OS is going to be looking for the all the hardware from the old machine, thus the reason for the BSOD and the stop error. As for doing a clean install you probably need to install your sata drivers in the beginning of the xp install. Shortly after you boot from your XP CD you'll see a screen that ask you if need to install any third party drivers and to press F6 and do so. The only alternative you have would be to go into your bios and set you SATA controller to IDE compatibility mode and the install should see your drives. However this mode does reduce the overall performance of the sata drive.

 

Many thanks, lcsmith39! Looks like a clean install is in my future. Tried setting SATA to IDE mode in bios, but that didn't work either.

Cheers,
Steve

 

Not a problem. You might try hooking the drive you want to install your OS to another sata port. Some motherboards have two different sata controllers. One being a raid controller with it's own little bios and the other being standard sata ports controlled by your regular bios.