Hard Drive Will Not Boot Up with WinXP

[wahoomcdaniel]

I have a WD 60 gig hard drive that is not booting up in an old PC. It's an old 300 MxH Pentium, has WinXP Pro operating system.

When powering up the system, I read the BIOS info, WinXP Pro screen comes up, blue screen with the message WinXP system is loading, and then nothing more. I do not get to the screen to pick a user name and move forward.

Here's what I want to do. Please advise of pitfalls or possible alternatives:

Pull the hard drive from the dead machine.
Install it in another PC as a slave.
Copy the data files I need.
Reformat that hard drive for future use.

When I install the hard drive in the new PC, will there be a conflict?
My worry is that the two operating systems may conflict with oine another.
Or is this taken care of by the boot sequence looking first to the primary drive?

Any advice you can offer would be appreciated.

 

[NotSoSimple]

Just be sure to designate Master and Slave drives and you should be good to go.

 

[JBT]

Originally posted by: NotSoSimple
Just be sure to designate Master and Slave drives and you should be good to go.

Yep no problem here as long as you have the drive you want to boot from set up correctly in the bios then your set. I have Win XP on my SATA drive and on my back up IDE drive and there is no conflict what so ever. I just have it set to boot from SCSI rather than IDE 0.

In your case you should set it so IDE 0 boots before IDE 1 ect or don't have IDE 1 boot at all.

 

[puffpio]

Well if you are installing it into another WinXP system and your old drive is NTFS..won't there be a problem becuase of the security settings on the files?
Linux can fix this...Boot w/ a knoppix CD, and read the files you want off your WinXP HDD onto a floppy or something. I'm not sure if knoppix has CD burning capailibites but maybe you can burn it onto a CD if it's too large to fit on a floppy