I recently got a new hard drive and loaded it up on a spare PC while my main one was being serviced. Anyway, I got the main PC back, inserted it,proceeded to use it. I eventually hooked it back up to the spare(a friends) along with a new drive in order to ghost the new drive so I can return it.Now neither drive will boot the spare PC. I just receive a blinking cursor or 'operating system not found' error. However, drive does show up in BIOS.CD drive nor the floppy are bootable. I've reseated the cables and RAM. Any suggestions as to the problem?It's odd because nothing has been done with the spare PC at all except move it back and insert the h. drive(jumpers appropriately set). thanks

Not to sound like an ass..but did you make sure the jumpers were set correctly...and the red stripes on the cable line up with Pin 1 on the MB? Did you make sure that the drive with the OS is the Master? IF you have a CD rom set up, it will be sometihng like this: drive 0=Master drive 1=slave cd rom = secondary master. Remember only 4 devices can go on 2 IDE ports. Sorry if this is insulting your intellegence, just simple things to try first. Matt

Make sure that the boot.ini file points to the right drive in your surrent physical configuration. If originally your drive was on a different ide bus or was designated a different master/slave config then you will have to change the boot.ini file. e.g.: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect rdisk is the position of the disk. 0=IDE1Master 1=IDE1Slave 2=IDE2Master 3=IDE2Slave Partition is self-explanatory boot.ini will currently be set to whatever configuration your pc was in when you installed the OS