HDD trouble

[Antitrust19]

Ok here's the deal. I have an old system that i used the HDD from it and put it on my new system and formatted it. Then i put it as my master drive and installed XP using "boot to cd method" and now when i put it back into my old system it says "operating system not found" although when i put it as slave on my new system it reads the windows xp folder "WINDOWS" but i have no clue what could be wrong!

[808smokey]

How "old" is the old system. Maybe it's soooo old it can't start Windows XP I would reset your BIOS/CMOS jumper too on the old system

[gmatov]

I don't know XP.

With that out of the way, does XP allow you to make any kind of a boot disk? I have read here of people DLing half a dozen of them.

If not, are you able to, in the working machine, format a floppy drive, and are you able to select "Copy System Files", the same as "Make Startup Disk" in 98?

If you are, do so, even 2 or 3 disks, if necessary, and get to an A:\ prompt, then type sys c: (enter). That should write the MS-Dos.sys, Command.com and other files that you seem to be missing.

These form the actual OS, more so than the window dressing that is 98, 2k, XP, GUIs that allow us mere mortals to use a computer.

Hope this works. I've had other people give me their drives to salvage data when they crashed, gave them back with OS re-installed, didn't work in their machines, redo, OK.

Cheers,

George

Remember, I'm not an XPert.