Scot Miller's post (clipped)

<<<I hooked up my sons old hd to the ide port and booted but the computer then tried to boot from the old hd instead of the new serial hd.Obviously his old drive would not boot due to some corruption in the os.>>>>

Hi,

sorry, but either i am not able to understand this correctly or there is a contradiction.
when you say that the computer "tried to boot..... how did you know this?
also after "failing" to boot from old hdd are we to understand that it then booted to win xp in your new hdd?

regarding the second part of your question i suggest you first enter the bios of the system in which you have both old and new hdd and ensure both are listed. also make sure that the win xp hdd is set to "master" jumper and the old hdd "slave". then if you see in the bios the new hdd as (hdd 0) and the old hdd as (hdd1) [the numbering 0,1, etc is dependent on your bios and some may show the make/ details of the hdd's].

then enter the "boot" menu and set it to boot from hdd 0. save settings and exit. hopefully it will boot to win xp.

the easiest method is utilising the facility some hdd manufacturers like "seagate"  "western digital" etc provide with their hdd (in the cdrom) for this very specific purpose. it depends on the make of hdd's you have.

the  other way may be to open my computer/open the old hdd drive/navigate to the data you want to transfer/ again open my computer in another window/navigate to the partition/folder to which you want to transfer(you will have to minimise the size of both windows so that they are viewable side by side)and drag the data from the old hdd and drop it into the partition/folder of the new hdd

the third method is to use win xp's  " files and settings transfer wizard" but for this you will have to reattach the old hdd to the old computer (assuming you have it and not used any hardware from that in your new build) and connect both the machines by what is known as "direct cable connection" and which is not difficult at all. let the list know if you need any help for this.

HTH and good luck----Venkat

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