I am going to attempt to take a hard drive out of a computer and put the hard drive in another computer (later on tonight). The hard drive already has windows 95 on it and I'm wondering what possible problems I might encounter. It's just that the motherboard is failing and I need to save the hard drive so I'm going to put it in a good computer.

How do you know the MBoard is failing? Just curious. The only thing to watch for is to set the jumpers properly and install on the cable properly. Usually, the drive with the operating system wants to be on the first IDE channel.

I believe the motherboard is going bad because my ide controllers have yellow exclamation marks in the device manager and my "A" drive and cdrom won't work. thanks, anything else you can think of let me know. I'm trying to be prepared cause something always goes wrong (it seems)

Your motherboard is fine. Something in the operating system has messed up and you are running in "DOS comapatability mode". Replacing the motherboard won't help. I would first try going into the registry editor and is the search field type in "noide" without the quotes. If you see this entry, delete it. There are other things you can try also but try this first.

let me know what else to try. I thought the yellow exclamations were telling me that the controllers are bad

Keep in mind the controller for the hard drive is on the hard drive itself. It's the circuit board mounted on the under side of the drive. Also, unless the PC that you're going to put the HD in has IDENTICAL hardware, you're going to have all sorts of problems. You can't take a hard drive from a computer and just put it in a different one.

Do you have an Intel board?If so install the inf program to detect all the hardware correctly. http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/filter_results.asp?strOSs=15&strTypes=DRV%2CARC&ProductID=816&OSFullName=Windows*+95&submit=Go%21 Good luck.