switching hard drives

[Zleaper]

I would like to switch my 120 gig ibm drive to another machine .
pc has a aopen mobo and pc 2 has a ecs mobo same video cards .
I get a inacessiable_boot_device
blue screen error
is it because w2000 cant have different mobo configs or is there a solution to this swapping.
reason for swapping is pc1 is being sold and a new hdd is going in . Temporerly i want to use pc2 and hdd from pc1

[buksida]

yes, i had this problem before with win2000 when swapping mobo's. i went ahead and formatted but there is a way round it i think, maybe someone will post it here again.

[NooNoo]

If the mobos have different makes or types of chipsets, you are probably looking at the very least installing over - I would suggest you return the disk to the original machine and backup the profiles and documents etc as these can be lost in this process.

If you can return the hard drive to the original machine, I suggest you make an ERD Details here

You could attempt a repair
MS Article with links to the repair options

Frankly I would save the hassle - back it up for format, that way any wierdness is going to be from the current install and not transferred from the old.

[Joker1]

I've found an excellent way of getting a 2K or even XP install to work on another mobo....

so far it's worked everytime i've tried it

1)first just switch the drive to the new board
(if you try booting you'll get the usual inaccessable boot device or some other blue horror)
2)pop in your wink2/xp cd and reboot
3)begin reinstalling
4)itll prompt you a first time to run recovery
5)tell it to keep doing a new install
6)few screens later it will give you another chance to do a recovery
7)choose yes

this will essentially have the same effect as nuking the enum key under 98, once it finishes running the recovery all installed apps, settings, profiles, users, etc etc etc will remain, however it will have completely redone the hardware detection phase.

[tk421]

right, that's the best way to do it if you dead set on not formatting and starting fresh. (you'd get a quicker and more reliable machine if you did.)