First Time DIY-er

[Persephone]

I just upgraded my motherboard, processor and RAM and all hardware is working fine. I want to use the same HDD from my old setup with this one. However, I can't boot into Windows which I expected would happen. My plan was to download a DOS drive image utility, create the image, reinstall windows, and then use the image. I tried using the Windows Recovery Console on the XP disk, but I can't seem to access the floppy drive from it. Since I also can't boot into Safe Mode Command Prompt I can't access it from there either. Is my only choice now to say bye to all my data and just re-install windows?

 

[InlineFive]

1. General Hardware Rule #1: Please list system specifications?
2. When moving between systems a WinXP Repair Installation (not the same as Recovery Console) does the job whilst keeping all your data intact.

-Por

 

[Persephone]

My apologies:

Shuttle AN35N-Ultra mobo
AMD "Barton" 2800+ CPU
512MB Mushkin RAM
Western Digital 7200RPM 40GB HDD
Sapphire Radeon 9000 AGP
Floppy Drive
Lite-On(?) DVD-Drive

Thats all I have installed for now...

 

[Matthias99]

Use a Repair Installation, as was suggested above. Go into the XP boot disk like you're going to install (*not* the recovery console), and pretty early on it will try to detect any existing installations and ask you if you'd like to "repair" one of them. Doing this will redetect all your hardware and should let you boot up again. You'll still need to install motherboard drivers, and reinstall DirectX, sound/video drivers, etc.