I recently moved my 80 gig HD with XP pro installed on it to a new system. The motherboard is an Intel chipset and it has a P3 800mhz processor. When I go into the BIOS it recognizes the Wester Digital HD but it won't boot from it. It is set to boot from floppy first then CD-Rom and then the HD, but when it tries to boot from the HD it just gives me a blank screen with cursor flashing. I would like to be able to rectify this situation without reinstalling XP mainly because I am setting this PC up for my parents and i left the XP cd at my place which is 3 hours away. Thanks for any help.

Even in the best of circumstances you would need your XP CD, because unlike in Windows 98 where you could move a hard drive from one PC to another, in XP the entire installation is locked to the PC (i.e. registry, devices, peripherals, etc.). You would have to reinstall XP anyway on to the new PC and XP would have to reinsatll and identify the new PC's devices. Sorry for this news. I - Sandor J Sound judgement, with discernment, is the best of seers. - Euripides (B.C. 480 - 406)

I am sure that I have read on microsoft knowledge base that there is a way around this if the Hard Drive is prepared for the move to the new computer BEFORE it is removed from the old one. I remember reading it and thinking it looked very complicated and I could not get my head round it. But,I have generally found that those microsoft knowledge base aaticles are in techy language and not clear to the likes of me. They really need writing in more simple terms. I reckon you will have to reinstal XP or put the hard disc back in the old PC to prepare it. If you look at this article, part of it mentions the problem if you replace the motherboard with one which has a different IDE Disc controller chipset which is probably in effect what the hard disc thinks in this situation: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;316401

do a repair from xp cd . still you will have to authenticate with MS once up and running .

Ok, Thanks to everyone who posted. I'm borrowing a friend's XP cd today, and I'll do the repair and if that doesn't work, then I'll just reformat. I'll let you know how it works out. -Thanks alot