Okay, I'll offer up a little back ground real quick. I got a new pc, and took the HD out of my old one and am using it as a second drive, all is fine. A friend gave me her old HD and I put into the the shell of my old one. It was running TERRIBLY slow. So, I went to run defrag on it, because she never had, and got a message stating that: drive's content has changed restarting, I then closed ALL the programs and disabled "find fast", rebooted, still the same message, so I booted it in 'safe mode" , AND STILL got that message. Then I decided, I would just jump it as a second drive on my new pc, defrag it and run an online virus scan on it! Now here's where I think the trouble started... Ugh, both my old HD and hers have windows ME, on them, it wasn't a problem when I jumped MY old HD as a second drive, but when I went to add hers it told me it had to see if it was compatible, and started this really slow, process, so I decided to just forget it, and pulled the plug on my new pc, unhooked the HD, and then decided, I would put my old HD, back into the other pc and jump her HD as a second drive and pull off all the info that she had wanted me to save for her, as her HD is more than half way full, I thought that emptying it a bit would perhaps, speed it up... Well, when I put the drives in, I put my old one as the master, and hers as the slave, turned on the pc, and got the message no operating system found. I scratched my head, because I thought that even if I had them switched that one of them would load windows ME. I rebooted and went into the Bios, thinking I would just change the boot order, but there were NO HDs listed, I checked all connections, still NOTHING... Did I screw up her drive by pulling the power? And furthermore, why didn't MY windows ME come up??? I didn't have jumpers on either, but the sash designates the master from the the slave??? PLEASE HELP!!! Thank-you in advance! ~ Nikki

Try clearing bios with the jumper or removing the coin shaped battery for a few minutes. Have power cord disconnected from pc

Clearing CMOS will NOT solve this problem because it is not a bios issue, it is a OS/chipset driver issue you should never add an old harddrive into another system unless you format it first. When you install windows (reguardless of what version) it installs files specifically for the system it is being installed on, therefore, you cannot simply plug a hardrive into another computer and have it work. If the two motherboards use the same exact chipset, the it may work, but will most likely still have problems Don't put a question here.

ME HARD DISC SWAP in my experience what King Cody says does apply with XP but does not apply with 98 & ME. I have taken hard drives with win98 and ME in and out of different computers and they have booted , but do come up 'detecting new hardware' grey boxes a few times - but they do Boot. MASTER/SLAVE I notice it is said that neither drives had jumpers on them. I think hard drives vary a bit on the jumpers but i think most are 'slave' with no jumpers on. For 'master' or even 'cable select' (where the master/slave is determined by cable plug position) you normally need at least one jumper on there. When you say the 'sash designates' are you referring to Cable Select? I think the computer may have regarded it as two slave drives and no master.

That is correct, when two drives are seen as slaves on the same cord the bios conficts and will not registar either. Get some jumpers, the local computer store will probaly give you a few for free at worst you have to pay for a bag of 50. Then read the jumper settings for both drives and set them as either one master one slave or mark them both for CS. If you mark one CS the other must also be marked CS. In your old computer I imagine it was the only HD on the ATA cable and you never had this problem, what you didnt know as that bios always say it as a slave and your friends old drive was also always a slave. Try this, or mount the other HDD on the CD-Rom line and format to save yourself time but you wont be able to use your CD-Rom during this time. If doing this does not work than there is some damage. And to the issue of swapping drives out, this only has to do with the primary boot drive, you can take an older drive from a 98 machine and put it as a 2nd in an XP box no problem, the reason is the setting for the computer are on the boot drive not on the other drive. The other drive works fine, all windows does is say there is a drive and installs the drivers to use it, noting more. Now if you take a primary drive from one system and make it primary in a totally differnt system then you have problems with driver mismatch and all, but even there all that is needed is to allow windows to install the new drivers which is actully less time consuming than installing windows agian, this will work with XP Home and Pro, I have done it, all you need to do is boot into safemode and then activate it and no problems there.