[RESOLVED] Installed Windows boot drive from a Dell/Intel box on an AMD Athlon/Abit KT7 box.....

[Rockymt4vr]

...and then I installed a new device: Guess what happened. Talk about an ugly death, it was sad. It would take about ten tries to boot to Safe Mode command prompt only after every reboot and I couldn't get it to boot from a floppy. It took me a week of sleepless nights during the middle of one of my graduate courses and working in order to resurrect it.

Moral of this story: If you are thinking of doing what I did.....don't! But if you feel compelled to live in hell for a week, at least move all your programs off the C: drive and then reformat it and then reinstall Windows and then move all your programs back to the C: drive (Partition Magic's Magic Mover works well for that). And if there's a more sensible way to migrate, I'd sure like to know how!

[Blackhawk]

Remove the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum key from the registry, shut down the donor pc, pull the drive, put it in the new machine, and boot. Windows will redetect all the new hardware.

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Blackhawk
[email protected]
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Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

[This message has been edited by Blackhawk (edited March 10, 2001).]

[Rockymt4vr]

Well, that certainly would have helped had I had done that in thr first place, eh? 8-) I am sure this will help prevent a lot of problems for people who are thinking of doing the same thing. Since I had already moved the drive over and jacked everything up, what I wound up doing was modifying my autoexec.bat and config.sys files to gain access to the cd-rom. From there I was able to reinstall Windows. After about a million attempts, I succeeded in deleting everything in the Device Manager and then then rebooting and have Windows detect and ask for drivers for all my other devices such as the device drivers for the Abit board.

Thanks again for your help!