Windows XP – Won’t Boot After Drive Transplant

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I moved my hard drive from my Lenovo laptop into my Asus Eee PC netbook. When I started the netbook, after POST all I got was a black screen with a cursor in the upper left corner.

I thought that the migration should work OK because this was a 32-bit version of Windows XP, and the Atom processor in the Asus should support the x86 instruction set. However, I don't know much about Windows, so maybe this was a dumb thought.

I did verify that the BIOS can find the drive.

It required major surgery to replace the drive, so any solution requiring me to remove the transplant drive is not going to fly.

Keeping in mind that the netbook has no optical drive and that I have no other Windows computers (all my other computers run Linux), is there any way I can fix this problem?

Thanks!

Nathan

Best Answer

Duplicate of: Swapping hard disk to new PC causes blue screen with Windows Server 2008

Drive "transplants" as you call them are usually not possible in Windows.

Due to the way in which drivers and the windows registry tie themselves to a machine's hardware, simply moving the hard drive from one computer to another usually doesn't give positive results.

Still, from what you are describing, it seems that the only solution you have is the one described in my answer to the question above. You're going to have to either find a USB optical drive and use that to boot the Windows CD or create a bootable USB drive with the Windows installer on it.

Good luck!

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