Adding SATA hard drive into computer that doesn't have any.

[bumchickabumbum]

Computer without the hard drives is a hp pavloin a1020n. The drives are W2500ks Wd calviar SE16. I have windows xp on the drives. I plugged the drives in and the keep on asking me to basically every component on the board. Depending on what drive I have plugged in different desktops come up and the start menu won't come up but the desktop icons will and I can go onto my computer. We had two different user accounts on the old computer so thats why the desktops are different. When I plug in the other drive I get a start menu but then it says it can't verify windows and give me the stupid blue screen ( that was after I installed all of the stuff from the main board). I booted up the blue screen one in safe mode and i could look through my files but I don't know what o do from there. Thanks and tell me if you need additional info.

 

[strollin]

The odds that an HDD with the OS (Windows or otherwise) installed on a different computer will work correctly when installed in another computer is not good, unless the 2 computers are virtually identical hardware wise. Your best bet would be to do a fresh install of XP after installing the HDD. XP doesn't inherently support SATA drives so you will need to obtain XP compatible SATA drivers.

 

[Dngrsone]

Windows assumes that you are not changing the motherboard on it, which is exactly what you have done.

Sometimes you can recover from this, other times not. In your case, you have one Windows installation which will at least boot into Safe mode, which is one we can work with.

Boot into Safe mode, then (under and administrator login) go to Control Panel, select System Properties and then hit the Devices tab. You need to remove any drivers that are specific to the old motherboard, and especially the hard drive drivers. When you are in Safe mode, the system is runnign on gneric drivers anyway, so it shouldn't be too difficult.

It may be a good idea to remove your video card specific drivers if the new machine is using a different video card (or in-built graphics).

Now would be a good time to scan for any malware, while you're at it.

Once you are done, reboot the machine, let Windows start normally, then it will start installing drivers for everything under the sun, including drivers for the motherboard that you are currently running from. If you have an internet connection readily available, you might download the latest/greatest drivers beforehand and install them manually. Depending on how long ago it was since you used these drives, you may have some serious catching-up to do with System Update.

 

[bumchickabumbum]

I am trying what Dngrsone said. If all of this doesn't work, can I install windows xp on it again with the same disc that was originally on the drives? I know windows is kind of weird about using the same disc for stuff. If I would do that, could I do that to both hard drives separately on different computers since the I don't need 500 gigs of memory? I have been getting old computers from people and most likely they wont have hard drives in them.

 

[Dngrsone]

You will be able to install Windows XP on one drive, provided the installation disc is not an OEM specific to one particular model computer. You will want to format the drive before reinstalling, so you might want to back up any important data.

 

[bumchickabumbum]

What I ended up doing was formating the drives and reinstalled the OS and it is working fine.