Computer doesn't recognize HD?

[explodinghead75]

Somebody at work gave me an Athlon XP 2000+ computer which is faster than my old p4 and it only has 256 mb RAM but it has 3 more slots; mine uses RAMBUS memory which is too expensive, so I was going to put my hard drive in this computer, which has no hard drive in it and when I tried I got a NON-SYSTEM disk error. It's a 40 gb IDE drive and it boots up fine in my Compaq so I don't know what the problem is. When the BIOS comes up it recognizes the drive, which has Windows XP installed.

[jbennet]

you need to change the boot order so it checks the HDD before the floppy, cdrom etc...

btw a new pc means you will have to reinstall windows

[explodinghead75]

I went in the BIOS and I couldn't find the boot order; maybe I was looking in the wrong place so I disconnected the CD ROM lol. But it still doesn't boot. OK I guess I will try booting from the CD ROM and reinstalling. That's going to be a pain.

[caperjack]

if you have a full version of winxp you can do a repair install ,others here don't suggest it but i do it all the time on motherboard changes .
check here = http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

also you can boot it to your old computer and uninstall the motherboard chipset drivers,this is sometime the only cause of the no boot in new tower ,

and about he boot order here one bios versions how to .
http://www.whitecanyon.com/how-to-change-boot-order.php

and another's its in the avanced feature section just scroll down a bit .
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p1.htm

hope this all helps ,good luck

[explodinghead75]

Well I don't know what's going on, but when I try to boot from the CD-ROM it hangs up. I get "Windows is inspecting your hardware" and the screen goes blank and nothing happens after that! When I took out the hard drive setup actually starts to load, but of course this won't do any good cause I can't reinstall or repair windows without the hard drive!

[explodinghead75]

Anyone know why this would happen?

[caperjack]

harddrive jumper settings ,bad ribbon cable ,harddrive not detected in the bios .bad IDE channel on mboard ,