Why won't identical hard drive work in another identical PC?

[rijir2001]

Okay. I have two Gateway Pentium 4 PCs that are identical. They both work fine. But if I take the hard drive from PC A and put it into PC B it won't boot from the hard drive. It recognizes it in the BIOS. But it keeps going to the menu to boot from safe mode although it won't run in safe mode it just starts over and keeps going back to the menu. If I put the old drive back in it boots fine.

I have tried removing the battery to reset the BIOS but it made no difference.

And to clarify both hard drive are also identical make, model, etc...

Why would this be?

[electricsguy]

Did you buy them from the same place and just make the quantity 2?

[AlanHK]

Windows goes to safe mode if its setup doesn't match the hardware it detects. So the computers are probably not identical in every way.

Try unplugging everything except the monitor, mouse and keyboard and booting. Or any PCI cards? Same amount of RAM? Same video card (though it should boot in VGA mode)?

Also, if it's a recent version of Windows, the DRM checks serial numbers, etc. So it thinks it's been pirated, though I'd expect it to say so and not just fail.

[Bjs]

Motherboard's serial number + bios serial / sting do not match known original os installation configuration checks ... wmi

It stops you from swapping hds from two pcs that are made from same components ... which prevents piracy of the os .

[rijir2001]

I got them both used from work. I guess this explains it all. Oh well. I thought it was an easy thing to do.

[buttzilla]

What is your reason for wanting to do this?

[gll99]

It may well be different hardware configurations but....

Are these IDE hdd? Are both drives' jumpers set the same ie... master/slave and/or in their home pc, are they on the same ide controller ie... primary or secondary. Pretty obvious I know but also easy to miss when your looking for something more complicated.

What happens if you leave your good drive in your pc and add the other one as a slave or put it on the secondary cable as a master? Can you operate with both drives in your system?

Just by chance is there already another hdd in your PC? This could add a slight complication in the boot.ini as to which drive and partition windows is residing on especially if the new drive is not configured, jumpered or was not on the same controller exactly the same as yours.

[rijir2001]

What is your reason for wanting to do this?

I wanted to set up a removeable hard drive system so that each member of my family could have their own hard drive. This way the kids can't mess up any HD besides their own.

[bevills1]

If you have more than 1 Windows version, you could setup dual boot system on 2 different drives, 1 master and 1 slave, without having to switch out drives. Then set passwords for each drive so that kids can only access 1 drive. Note to setup dual boot you'd need to install WinMe, Win98, etc. first and then install WinXP or Win2k choosing new install instead of upgrade option.