Windows not booting up

[shayahakohen]

I had an old 40gb hard drive with my windows on it and when i got a new one i decided to just copy everything. i didnt have time to make a ghost so i used xcopy with all the paramaters. i tried booting up and it didnt work. i was fine with that i just used the new hard drive to keep all my data on. last night my 40 gb with my os on it died. is there any repair that i could do that will replace all the messed up system files? The screen when i boot up is something like the boot sector is damaged. i already loaded windows repair did chdsk that was fine. did fixboot. did a couple other things. i do have system restore enabled if that will help. also i am unable to boot up in safe mode so dont suggest that.

 

[talldude123]

You have to do a fresh install of Windows XP when you get a new HD, because the OS is used to all of your old information, plus Microsoft makes you activate when you get new hardware, so how would they when you just "copied a hard drive"?

The only thing you can do is reformat, and reinstall.

 

[shayahakohen]

Its the same machine. Just another harddrive. Anyway thats gonna suck because i have a lot of data on that drive and i dont know where im going to store it all.

 

[Law]

Leave the old harddrive alone, the data will still remain. Install your Windows on the new harddrive then after, connect the old harddrive as a secondary slave. It should appear in "My Computer" place and you should be able to access the data.

You'll probably need to take owner ship of the folder/files if there's a permission restriction.

 

[shayahakohen]

I mean i have a lot of data on the new harddrive that i dont have on the old one.

 

[Law]

So what do you want to do? Do you want to transfer the data from the new harddrive to the old one?

If your old harddrive is corrupted and you want to install a fresh copy of Windows then just format it and install. Since the data is already backup on the new harddrive, why not just install the OS back on the old harddrive then plug the new harddrive as secondary to become a backup device. The OS will reside on the old harddrive and all your current data is on the new harddrive.