dell ide hard drive in emachine t3604 sata. wont load past boot menu

[jimmy1200]

so basically, found a random desktop outside the dumpster i guess someone was getting rid of, and i was like, eh, looks pretty new, lemme take it in and check it out. only thing missing was the front piece and the hdd,everything else was in tact. so i figured lemme take the hdd out of my crappy computer i use and try to hook it up to the "new" one. well my old one has an ide setup, and this one is a sata hookup. i unplugged the ide cable and power from the cd/dvd drive in the new machine, set my ide hdd to master, and plugged it into the emachine. i booted everything up, and it came to the boot menu to choose, safe mode, safe mode with networking, normal, ect.. so i choose normal, emachine logo pops up, starts loading, i see hit f2 or f10 in the bottom right hand corner, the usual, but then it just goes back to the boot menu asking for safe mode, normal, ect... i went into the bios and i see it recognizes my hdd and everything else looks normal.

anyone have any idea why it wont boot up. im on my old pc now. i just popped the hdd back in and booted on up no problem. also, just to put it out there, i do have a few external hdd's i could possibly use as an internal hdd i think.

old pc is a dell with ide hdd
new pc is an emachine t3604 with sata hdd hookup
i already tried to boot into safe mode, safe mode with networking, and last working configuration, but it always takes me back to the boot menu. this is with the old hdd in the "new" emachine.
hdd works fine in old pc

might it be some other hardware issue with the emachine, or is there some basic configuration im missing out on to prevent it from loading past the emachine logo.

thanks for the help

edit. oh, dell is old.its a dimension 4300. haha. oh, and im running windows xp pro

 

[MindoverMaster]

You can not boot off a HDD between systems. Windows gets confused, as all it's hardware settings are now all different. You have to do a fresh install.

 

[Lexluethar]

It won't boot because its two comletely different hardware profiles.

The only time you can even take a hard drive out of one PC and have it just load without issue on another PC is if the PC profile is similar (IE drivers are the same or from the same manufacturer). Even then technically you are breaking the microsoft licensing agreement because one XP license=one computer.

If you want that hard drive to work on this machine you will need to do a fresh install of windows.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Actually in my experience, you can transfer a HDD is if you have the same chipset.

I had a P55 ASUS board. I had to send it into RMA. So I got a Gigabyte board, same chipset. I thought I was going to have to reinstall, so I just tried to see if it was transferable. It was. That even stumped KSoD.