Yes! It worked!!

Thanks payo, I really appreciate it!

My sound is nonexistant and my video a little strange, which I assume to be because I don't have the proper drivers for them, but that shouldnt' be a problem to fix.

Hell yeah.

Jtlyk

Just to let you guys know, I have NO IDEA what they were talking about, and dont understand how they solved this problem? What was it that they were switching back and forth and testing for 10 seconds?
If you guys didn't notice, Payo is not the most literate person you've ever met, I dont know how Savage was understanding him....
Any of the TechSpot members care to break it down for me? I dont understand what they did...

Thanks,
Chaz D.

Chaz, you're right, payo is hard to understand at times.

I simply found the three-prong motherboard jumper (it was right next to the battery like he said), switched it from 1-2 config. to 2-3 config for 10 seconds, then switched it back. It reset the CMOS.

I also switched HD cables. Dunno if that helped any or not, though.

If your system was freezing on the "first screen", that would have absolutely ZERO to do with what is loaded on the hard drive itself (i.e. a Windows issue). This problem was fixed only by one of these two items:

1) Reset the CMOS. Do so by using the CMOS Clear jumper. Which is usually located by the battery. While the system is OFF and power plug OUT, put the jumper on whichever 2 pins it isn't currently on, wait 10 seconds, and put it back.

2) Swapping the IDE cable may have done the trick also. If a connector was loose, corrupt, 40-pin versus 80-pin etc... The BIOS would not be able to detect the drive and would halt the boot process.

Those two things would have been my first suggestion. And usually IS the first things you do when a system has trouble so early in the boot process.

Glad it's done, I missed this conversation.

AWESOME NEWS!!! I am glad that I was completely 100% wrong :knock: , and you got it working. :wave:

Maybe so, but it is also the BEST advice NOT to take a hard drive from one machine and stick it in another. The chances of it working are slim. Take in to account not only all the changed hardware, but activation information as well, hardware identifier keys, encryption codes based on hardware ID, etc....
For example, my friend simply upgraded to a new CPU, then BOOM XP doesn't let him use Media Player or Real Rhapsody because the music license keys didn't check against the new hardware or some stupid thing. And he was locked out of all the music and it wouldn't repair itself.

Let's just say, rather odd things can happen when transfering an HDD like this.