Can't boot after replacing HD/switching computers

[v1rtuoso]

Why is it that if you take a hard drive with windows installed on it or any other OS for that matter and install it in another system and attempt to boot off that drive, it fails? It seems like all the information for booting should be stored in the master boot record. The reason I'm asking is my main pc failed and I wanted to boot into my main pc since I had a bunch of stuff installed and customized. I took out the boot harddrive w/ win2k installed and replaced the hd on another comp with it, but after the BIOS diagnostics, I get an error message.. NTLDR missing. Is there a way to get around this?

 

[waitman]

In xp if you switch pc's, the os will see different hardware and it won't work, it's to keep you from using it on more than one pc

 

[v1rtuoso]

Yea, I understand in winxp you have to reactivate if u switch a significant amount of hardware, but in my case, I had Win2k installed. I assumed I could just take the HD, connect it to another comp, and boot off it.

 

[amdskip]

You can't do this. Windows will see the different hardware and many times it will boot but there will be too many problems to deal with and it's best to format for every new motherboard the hard drive is hooked up to. There is a file that you can delete before moving the hard drive to sort of delete the current motherboard information but you can't do that if you can't boot into windows.

I would install this into a working computer and boot off the normal drive. Grab your stuff and format the drive.