catastrophic system failure!

[sporty]

Here's what happened. I had a freind who's computer crashed dead. I was going to try to salvage her hard drive. I took the hard drive out of one of my computers and installed hers. The HD wouldn't boot, so I inserted a Windows XP Home recovery disc to try to do a repair on the OS. It went thru the copy files bit and the auto reboot then the windows startup screen came up (the one with the Windows XP logo and the little bar scroling under it) after a couple seconds it flased a blue screen of death for a split second and went into a reboot. The same thing happened again at the reboot so I figured the HD was toast. I took the HD out and put mine back in. The computer started but I got nothing on the monitor,no bios,no splash screen,nothing not even a blinking curser. I unpluged it, rechecked the connections on the HD and monitor, pluged it back in and now it's totally dead no power at all. It acts like it's not plugged in. Did I fry the mobo? short the PSU? I don't really know where I should start. Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.

The system is:
ASUS K8V SE Deluxe
AMD Athlon 64 3700+
1.5 Gig RAM
GeForce MX4000

[johnny_quest]

Welcome,

You cannot swap a harddrive and expect to boot off of it. It's partly a security feature so people can't just "clone" a harddrive a hundred times and avoid buying copies of software. Windows is tied to certain mac-ids (serial numbers) of your motherboard, and other hardware I'm sure. Anyways,

you CAN still recover files off of the hard drive, you need to add it as a SLAVE drive. You need to set the jumpers on the drive to "SLAVE" and you pop it in a working computer. You are still going to boot off of the other computer, and the drive you're trying to recover will pop up as a simple storage device with a drive letter, just like when you pop in a usb jump drive or cd-rom.



As for the computer that's now broken, I don't really see how what you did could in itself "fry" anything, but it's possible that your actions may have bumped something loose or damaged something? ESD (static) can be fatal to pc components as well.

I would try a barebones boot, you can google it for more info but you're basically going to take everything out of that computer and try to narrow it down to a single piece of bad hardware, process of elimination.

All you really need to at least POST is a mobo, cpu, one stick of ram, and a video card (or onboard video)

[azzey]

My guess is something is loose... no other reason why it wouldn't work.

Remember that if you're setting the extra hard drive as SLAVE, you must make sure that the BIOS is still set to boot to your original system drive.

You cannot just take a hard drive from another computer and try to boot from it unless you have EXACTLY the same hardware. This is because during the Windows Installation, Windows configures itself for that particular hardware. If you put it in another machine, it looks for the old hardware, can't find it, then freaks out and gives you the BSOD you mentioned.

If all you need is the data, then just connect it as SLAVE and copy it off.

[Sylvander]

"You cannot just take a hard drive from another computer and try to boot from it unless you have EXACTLY the same hardware"
That would be true only IF you attempted to boot without first running a repair.
If you don't run a repair and if the hardware isn't identical, then Windows hasn't been set up for use on that hardware and is most unlikely to work.
However...
After a repair has been run on the Windows installation, Windows is then capable of working with EITHER set of hardware, but with modern versions of Windows must be licenced/activated for use, almost certainly for only one of those hardware sets.
After 30 days Windows would disable itself for use on any hardware sets that are significantly different from that for which it is licenced.

Windows is actually capable of being set up for use on multiple sets of hardware. It was designed to be so.
Hence it would be possible to move a HDD between various PC's once it had been set up for use on each of those [and licenced for each].

The settings for each set of PC hardware would be included in the various branches of the hardware tree in the registry.
When Windows was being loaded it would detect which particular set of hardware was connected, use the appropriate settings from the registry to initialise the hardware, and use the appropriate drivers, and all should work.

[mjc]

Windows is actually capable of being set up for use on multiple sets of hardware. It was designed to be so.
Hence it would be possible to move a HDD between various PC's once it had been set up for use on each of those [and licenced for each].


Being designed to do it and actually being able to do it, without hassles are definitely two different things.

Because of the licensing restrictions, things are actually much more difficult than they need to be...especially when it comes to OEM editions from major manufacturers. Those editions tend to be even more tied to the hardware than the bought-separately OEM or retail editions. Also, with many preinstalled versions, there is no practical way to do a 'repair' install, because, there is no real install disk...there is if you are lucky a restore disk (CD or DVD), but this isn't an OS install disk. And often, the full version (retail/OEM) disks won't work (one reason or another) with the install.

So, while technically being possible, practically, it is, very often, an adventure to do it...

The easiest, least hassles is when moving to new hardware do a new install of the OS.

[Sylvander]

"now it's totally dead no power at all. It acts like it's not plugged in"
Might be a faulty on-switch; or perhaps the switches' connection wires and connector came off the pins.
Try shorting the on-switch pins on the mobo.

Plus bare-bones.

[kiosk]

Many mainboards act like this when their CMOS memory gets corrupt, which can happen if solder points on the mainboard or some other component short against something conductive, like a system case for example. Keep in mind that mainboard capacitors retain little charge even after you've unplugged the computer, and when you short something out in an unplugged system, you can create a short power surge in unexpected places which will almost certainly confuse the CMOS memory. My asus P2B does this EVERY GODDAMN TIME I turn off the power to work inside the system case. This generally isn't destructive (we're talking about couple of volts maybe), but it will prevent MANY mainboards from POSTing. Have you tried clearing the CMOS first?

[sporty]

Problem solved. OK I guess I jumped the gun on this one. I started stripping the system down and found the big 20 pin connector to the mobo loose, reseated it and all is well again. The systed (with my hadr drive back in it ) booted right up, I got the black "Windows was not shut down properly..." screen, which I would kinda expect when the HD was unplugged, I just hit 'Start Windows Normaly' and she came right up-everything fine. As for the friend's computer she's gonna buy a new PC and we'll hook her old HD up as a slave a copy her picture/documents etc. Thanks for all the replys, I did learn my lesson about swaping hard drive from on PC to another.

[azzey]

Glad to hear you have everything sorted out. Thanks for posting back and letting us know all is well!