I've recently sent a friend of mine a new hard drive to use on their computer. The drive worked perfectly fine for me, and I had gone through all the trouble of updating windows etc for them and including the 2k cd out to them. When they plug it in however, the computer reads the drive... it will get to the white loading bar and load it some and then reboot. We've tried loading it up in safe mode, making sure the ide and power are securely in. Made sure the ram didn't become loose, etc. I've been trying to find out what this could possibly be but I obviously haven't struck gold on it yet. I would like for them to be able to keep the drive intact, since I put on a lot of files for them and it would be a huge pain to have to send it to them. Has anyone had this problem, or know what I can do to fix it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You can't do it that way. Win2K will have to be loaded on that machine. Your hardware and there hardware are too different and Windows is choking.

hmm, I've been able to just swap it onto other machines before. I cannot be physically at the machine, so I've been having to talk to my friend over the phone. I should be able to get them to do a reinstall, without losing whatever I put onto the drive for them, correct?

Doubtful. the problem lies in the IDE drivers. Unless you stripped them out before you sent the system to them, doing a re-install will not replace them, just the system files.

HELLO, do you think it might be because of the updates that you did? i have win2k and i installed service pack 1 and my computer did the same thing. i had to do a full install, but i haven't seen the option of installing win2k on a system w/out formatting the whole drive. maybe you can but i haven't seen it even when my partitions were still intact it formatted the whole drive to NTFS again. hope i'm wrong for your sake! HTH, <shad>

I'm not so sure about the updates. I read a thing about that though, after SP4 (?) I think it was caused it to shutdown over and over. It ran perfectly fine on the machines over here after I had installed and did all the windowsupdates. I just really don't want to have to opt out with the clean install since there are important files on it. I have installed 2k before, and XP on some of my machines to where it's not a clean install (even through just the dos boot up way) where it just reinstalled over the current installation. I could be wrong though, maybe it was all my imagination. I haven't had to do it in a very long time.

do you think that you could get a small hdd (like 2 or 3 gig's) just big enough to install win2k and plug the important drive in as a slave and maybe you can save the files like that? assuming the partition table isn't messed up, but it's worth a shot. HTH, <shad>