[nterry]

My laptop was giving me some problems and wouldn't boot from CD, so I took out the hard drive and put it into my desktop. I then reformatted the hard drive with a clean installation of windows xp pro. When I put the hard drive back into my laptop it comes up with this error that a recent hardware or software changed has caused windows not to start successfully and when I try starting in safe mode or start windows normally after that, it just freezes. The bootable options and the bios won't load up on my laptop to be able to boot from cd or to change any settings. So is there anyway that I can add any particular drivers or change the motherboard settings on the hard drive when its in my desktop before I put it in the laptop to be able to get it to boot on my laptop? Hence installing XP on a different computer and transfering that hard drive to a different computer? If you have any ideas I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

[samiko]

You can't install XP on one PC and transfer the HDD into a completely different PC. The hardware abstract layer differs, this gets selected at the initial installation of Windows XP and you can't change it after the installation.

You can only move primary hard drives between identical Pc's that have the same motherboard etc.

So unfortunately your method won't work unless you install it on your laptop.

Hope that answeres your questions.

[MULDIS]

Try formating the hard drive in your desktop pc and placing it back into your laptop then try to boot from the cd.

most machines will boot from the cd-rom if the hard drive has no os install on it.