Problem booting old hard drives on new system?

[donfm]

This post is a sequel to another post but on a different problem. My mobo crashed and I have to replace it. My question is this....if I use the hard drives from my old mobo and install them with a new mobo, will they boot? I used winxp pro with a password for my account on the previous setup.

When I tried checking the disc drives from the failed computer on another spare dell computer the primary hard drive would not boot on its own. But when I install the hard drives as secondary I could read files from it except it would not let me access "My Documents" under my username. I presume the permissions caused this.

How do I get around the permissions problem when I try and use the hard drives from my old system to access my account? Please don't tell me I have to do a clean install of XP and wipe the drives clean........grrrrrr...this whole thing is turning into a nightmare.

So basically I need to know how do I get back up and running with my old hard disks on a new mobo installation with Win XP Pro without losing anything????

 

[Elias824]

yeah you should be able to drop your hdd into a new computer, try booting into safe mode and from there removing all the drivers from you old system. Ive done this quite a few times before, XP usually is ok with it but using anything older like 2k will never work. Also as long as the 2 boards are not vastly different, IE going from an AT to and ATX style system.