Windows XP won't boot after drive transplant

I moved my hard drive from my Lenovo laptop into my Asus Eee PC netbook. When I started the netbook, after POST all I got was a black screen with a cursor in the upper left corner.

I thought that the migration should work OK because this was a 32-bit version of Windows XP, and the Atom processor in the Asus should support the x86 instruction set. However, I don't know much about Windows, so maybe this was a dumb thought.

I did verify that the BIOS can find the drive.

It required major surgery to replace the drive, so any solution requiring me to remove the transplant drive is not going to fly.

Keeping in mind that the netbook has no optical drive and that I have no other Windows computers (all my other computers run Linux), is there any way I can fix this problem?

Thanks!

Nathan

Duplicate of: Swapping hard disk to new PC causes blue screen with Windows Server 2008

Drive "transplants" as you call them are usually not possible in Windows.

Due to the way in which drivers and the windows registry tie themselves to a machine's hardware, simply moving the hard drive from one computer to another usually doesn't give positive results.

Still, from what you are describing, it seems that the only solution you have is the one described in my answer to the question above. You're going to have to either find a USB optical drive and use that to boot the Windows CD or create a bootable USB drive with the Windows installer on it.

Good luck!

It will crash because the motherboard's chipset is different in the other computer.

Windows 9X e.g. 98 You could take the hard drive from one computer to another with a different motherboard chipset. So, what you did would have worked with Win98

Windows NT (XP,2K,e.t.c.) cannot. It is built differently.

You're using XP of course.. And you can fix it after the "fail", by doing a windows xp repair installation. Boot off the windows XP CD to do so.

You will obviously have to install drivers for your computer's components.. But that's fine. Same as one would have had to do with Win98. (the fact of having to install drivers) and possibly removing old drivers. You may get by without installing drivers manually.

Note- Some people use a method acronis has to make an image of windows NT(so XP included) from one computer and put it onto another computer with a different motherboard chipset.