Problems with upgrading friends pc

[astoroth88]

My friend bought my old nforce 650i motherboard off of me and I put his old hard drive (ide darkstar) and old IDE cd and dvd drives on it, now all it does is give a "Error loading Operating system" after it loads everything else in the BIOS. What's going on with this, compatibility issues (his old hard drive and dvd/cd's were in a VAIO) or what?

[jlreich]

If you didn't reinstall when you put the drive in the new system that is why. Different hardware and different drivers equal BSOD. ;)

You can try a repair install if you have the windows disk, but if it is an OEM copy of windows that came with the VAIO it will be in violation of the EULA since that copy is tied to the original machine and only that machine.

[Sylvander]

Try some Puppy variation loaded off a "live" optical disk, and he'll have a really nice OS up and running in no time.
You can install if you want [to HDD or Flash Drive], but it isn't really necessary; you can instead just make a "Pup_save" file at 1st shutdown/restart in which are saved new configurations and installations introduced during a "session".
This file [plus others off the optical disk if you want a faster load at startup] can be saved in any handy storage location [Flash drive or internal HDD partition] with any of a number of various file systems [FAT, NTFS, Linux ext2 or ext3 etc].

Give a try to Muppy Linux 008.4c for starters (http://puppylover.netsons.org/dokupuppy/pupplets:muppy_live_0084c).

The only screenshot I could find in a hurry (http://minisys-linux.de/muppy0083/EN/index.htm). Click on it to magnify.

[astoroth88]

I reinstalled vista and we got it to boot just fine but after windows update installed and restarted it claimed no OS again.... I'm buying this HDD off of new egg, 1TB for only 87 bucks and no shipping, and giving him my old 250gb sata HDD, i'm done pissing with IDE cables lol