Won't get past the second screen when booting up computer?

[ChrstPip]

Hi everyone I recently discovered a little about computers in my vocational engineering program at my highschool and I guess I started using my Grandmothers desktop as my lab rat and I started off by adding like memory sticks from old broken computers to hers, that worked out fine, added an extra dvd/rw /cd/whatever drive from an old broken computer to it that worked fine. Then I added an extra hard drive to the computer and the first one I added worked accept a couple files that I used on the added hard drive while it was still alive lol in the computer it came with said they were empty like my entire user account was cleared and an error message came up saying access denied or something and that it was empty which I would think is impossible so if someone has an answer to that thats cool,BUT!,The real problem is I guess I was not satisfied with that so I took an older hard drive and swapped it with the one i had added to the computer the first time and then things went horribly wrong the computer will currently turn on go to the initial page with the options of pushing like f2 and f11 or 10 what ever it is and then it goes to the normal black screen with the flashing cursor like normal but it stays at that screen for ever the cursor steadily flashing, what can I do? Anyone? lol

Thanks

[ScudRunner50]

Try going into the boot menu and see how many operating systems you have to choose from. Also, you need to make sure that one of your hard drives is set as a master and the extra one is set to be a slave.

[willcomp]

Either a drive is faulty or jumpers are not configured correctly.

[Selwyn]

make sure the jumper setting on the hard drive is the master setting.
Then go into the bios and change the pc to boot from the cd rom.
Then install a fresh copy of windows.
If you have access to another pc see if the hard drive works in that pc.

[ebarrera]

If you are getting just the flashing cursor, which many of us have seen, that means that it is not able to load your OS. Make sure that the jumpers are set correct. you can only have one master per ribbon cable.