Agency said:
I think you need to be more specific.
Drive F is the drive with your OS on it?
Drive C is the HD you just put into your PC?
Just to re-clarify...so cypher, Drive F is the drive with Windows installed which was already in your PC
...and Drive C is the second Hard Drive you took from the other old PC, and put into this one...?
With the first drive in your system (Drive F)...did you change the drive letter? Just curious because I thought when you install Windows, it will always label the Windows partition with the letter C:
.
And to clarify a bit more, does your second hard drive that you just put in have an OS already installed? If so, is it your intention to try and boot into the OS of the hard drive you just put into your system? Or does it just hold data but not have an OS...?
If you're trying to boot into the OS of the drive you just put into your machine, simply put, the ntldr message is appearing because the system isn't configured to boot into the new drive. Really, you're not supposed to freely swap hard drives (each with an OS installed) from machine to machine and expect the PC to be able to boot, because the BIOS isn't configured for the drive and the boot partition doesn't correspond with the new PC.
But you should be able to get past it. If both hard drives have operating systems (installed in a non dual-boot config) then the problem is that you have two hard drives each with their own
Master Boot Record. Both Operating Systems can't see one another, and your BIOS is seeing two MBRs.
...Try setting the first drive as the primary boot device in BIOS, booting into the
Windows Recovery Console, which you can boot into using the
Windows XP Installation CD. Log into your OS on the first drive, then type
bootcfg /rebuild to try and add the second, newly installed hard drive's OS to the boot file on the first drive.
Hopefully, when you boot into your first drive, it should display a list of both the OS on the first and second drive (a dual-boot config) allowing you to choose which one you want to boot into.
If that doesn't work re: .