I took an old 20 gig hard drive from my old PC with Windows XP Pro and everything still on there. I removed it from my old PC and put it in my new PC. Plugged in the molex connector and the IDE ribbon cable and hooked everything up. Then I turned on the power for the first time and the BIOS loaded up. It detected my hard drive so that was a good sign. So I exited the BIOS and little BIOS voice goes "now loading operating system." Here's where the problem starts. All of a sudden this really really quick blue screen flashes with some words on it (it goes by so fast I can't even read it) and my computer just reboots. It never loads the OS. It does this over and over and over again.
Now somebody told me that this was probably happening because you can't take some random old drive with an OS and put it with a new motherboard and expect it to just work. Is this correct?
Well anyways, now the problem get's terribly worse. I got sick of that blue screen so I decided to just put the hard drive back into my old PC just so I could use that one for the time being while I figured out what was wrong with my new one. I plug the hard drive back into my old PC, FAILING TO REALIZE THAT THE POWER CABLE WAS STILL PLUGGED IN. Nothing happened while I was plugging it in, but as soon as I hit the power button I smell smoke. I see this orange light coming from my case, and I look down, and there's a flame coming from my hard drive!!!! I take it out and I find that one of the chips on the PCB or whatever its called on the bottom of my hard drive has a little white scorch on it....
So now I'm freaking out that if I turn the power of my old PC back on, the same thing will happen. But I needed to test the hard drive to make sure it still worked. I unplugged it from my old PC and put it back into my new PC, remembering that even though the OS wouldn't load, the BIOS of the new PC still recognized it. Well this time it didn't. I think because that one little tiny chip got fried I won't be able to load the drive anymore.
So my three questions are:
1) Why wasn't my old hard drive not loading my OS when I just placed it in my new PC? Can you do that?
2) What can I do about recovering the data on this hard drive? Will I ever be able to use it again?
3) This is a slightly off-topic question, but can you transfer the contents of an entire hard drive, OS and all, directly over to another hard drive without reinstalling Windows and everything else? I mean can you transfter EVERYTHING directly?
Thanks so much. I really appreciate any help anyone has to offer!
Edited by Kerryman87, 06 July 2005 - 06:08 PM.