Member Avatar for luckyduck

I,m tring to swap a good running harddrive from a dell 4400 into a Dell 2400. but the 4400 won,t bootup when atempting to start up. It does not seem to recognise the drive ,They are both Seagates. Whats the snag? Thanks

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Member Avatar for sknake

Where does it fail in the boot process and what type of drive is it? IDE, SATA, etc.

Do you see the BIOS splash screen? If so can you go in the BIOS and auto detect your HDDs and see if it shows up. If it shows up do you see the Windows splash screen? If so then reboot and hit F8 and boot in to safe mode with without networking. See if it starts loading DLLs. More than likely it will fail at HAL.dll if you've switched chipsets on the motherboard between the computers.

Member Avatar for barney789

What os are you using? If it is vista you have to initiate the new hard drive in order for vista to recognize it. You do this by going into the administrative tools and click on computer management\storage\disk management and follow the directions after that. You will need to reformat the "new" hard drive though. I hope this helps

commented: neat +9
Member Avatar for luckyduck

i,m running windows xp pro, both drives are ultra ATA, it starts to load then a blue screen appeares indicating some problem that could damage the computer. it was suggested i go into device manager and delete the ide ata/atapi master controller, leave primary and secondary ide channels. restart and it will take off, I,m afraid of this, any thoughts on this procedure ? thanks

Member Avatar for caperjack

i,m running windows xp pro, both drives are ultra ATA, it starts to load then a blue screen appeares indicating some problem that could damage the computer. it was suggested i go into device manager and delete the ide ata/atapi master controller, leave primary and secondary ide channels. restart and it will take off, I,m afraid of this, any thoughts on this procedure ? thanks

That might work ,you will likely have to format and re-install winxp first before its going to work for you.you problem is caused by different device drivers from one computer to the other

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