HELP: Switching the OS harddrive into a different computer.

Ya got me a little confused here - did the machine boot successfully into safe mode, then present you with the BSOD when you attempted to reboot normally, or did it give you the BSOD when you tried to boot into safemode as well?

Might be helpful to know the make/model of your processor, motherboard, and hard drive, the amount, brand, and type of memory you have installed, what BIOS version is present, what you have for graphics, audio, and networking solutions, and what Operating System you're running.

Oh Sorry!!...
Yeah, I might to give you all that. I'm running Windows XP and I'm swittching from a Celuron to an Pentium D...Mother board originially was an Asus and I'm switching to an uh...Pheonix...and no unfortunately the Blue Screen of Death came up everywhere safe mode and normal mode. I was hoping that I could get into safe mode and do some drive installs diagnositcs and have it all happy again. PS: the harddrive is Maxtor if that makes a difference.

OK - so it doesn't boot at all, huh? Do you get any sort of POST (Power-on Self Test) info - usually black & white text - when you first fire it up, or just Blue Screen?

Another question - have you tried to boot from your XP install disc?

Wasn't one of the features of XP that it was restricted to the computer it was installed on? I seem to recall complaints of computers no longer working if you replaced too many components and XP thought it was a different computer. Not sure if the failure was a BSOD though.

Failing validation wouldn't generate a BSOD - it brings up a warning, but Windows will work - although lack of validation limits Windows fuctionality if not properly and in timely manner addressed, XP'll boot just fine with or without validation. Been there done that a few more times than I really care to have been.

I'm wondering if the reported boot failure is due to a missing or corrupt boot.ini file, a BIOS issue, failed or mismounted hardware, driver mismatch ... that sorta stuff. Dunno though. I think if it were on my workbench, I'd prolly first wanna see what a BartPE disc would do - if the machine wouldn't boot from that, I'd say the options just got real limited.

Trying a known-good hard drive in the machine, and trying the suspect hard drive in a known-good machine would be logical next steps, but if no happy happy joy joy there, things ain't real promissing.

Booting from the install disk...
I hadn't thought of booting from the install disk. I think that's a great idea. I will try that.

Though about messages: I get all the standard messages, and since I just put this together I had to set somethings in the CMOS to get it to stop complaining about some issues with the newly installed CPU and Memory. Anyway, the computer properly reads out the ammount of ram, the harddrives and disk drives, all the generic boot-up tests and then begins to load windows...(Or instantly goes to the screen that asks: boot normally or safe mode with all the various options.) After choosing an option is when it dies. I see a blue screen flash up, but then the computer resets so quickly there's no way to read the screen.

I gave up!
Okay I just gave up and I'm just going to reinstall. There's nothing wrong with the new computer it all works and all. So I'm just going to go from scratch. I was sort of wanting to do that anyway because I wanted to set up a Raid. So here's my next question: is there any advice anybody would give me before I tackle setting up a raid? I have to harddrives that are 114 and 115 gb. I want to raid the two. What should I do?

While its not absolutely necessary the drives in a RAID setup be identical, it is good practice, for a number of reasons. One major consideration is that defining the overall performance will be the characteristics of the drive of lower specification; a RAID setup using drives of different storage capacities, for instance, simply will not utilize the larger drive's additional space. Mismatch of drive rotation speed, read/write speed, and/or throughput can present problems too, and in any event any speed advantage inherent to the faster drive will not be realized.

That out of the way, what do you expect to accomplish through a RAID setup? There are many RAID configurations, some granting performance enhancement, others providing data integrity enhancement. The 2 most common RAID setups are RAID 0 and RAID 1, most typically in 2-drive configurations, other configurations more or less amount to permutations on/variations of the basic setup.

RAID 0, or disk striping, essentially treats 2 drives as 1. Data is split between both drives, which the machine accesses in parallel; effectively, it "sees" 1 drive. RAID 0 will "speed things up", an advantage relative to gaming or multimedia performance, but if anything, it must be considered that data is less protected in a RAID 0 setup than with a single hard drive, as there are 2 drives, 2 possible failure sources, and failure of either, whether mechanical fault or data corruption, means failure all around.

RAID 1, or mirroring, essentially writes all data simultaneously to both drives. RAID 1 has no relative effect on performance, but does provide fully redundant data storage; if something goes wrong with 1 drive or its data, the other is still there, which is a distinct advantage for machines oriented to business or research applications.

RAID 2 is similar to RAID 1, but involves 2 or more drives with either duplicated drive partitions or a separate drive used not for direct handling of data but as a "check disc", sorta like a hall monitor to more or less see to keeping things orderly. As with RAID 1, there's no speed advantage - in fact, there can be a speed penalty - but there is data redundancy.

RAID 3, RAID 4, and RAID 5 all involve multiple drives, usually in odd number, with 1 or more drives dedicated to parity checking - making sure the data streams from the other drives are in agreement with one another, more or less, with RAID 5 going as far as to make the error correction redundant across 1 or more pairs of drives. There is a speed advantage over RAID 1 or RAID 2. One way to look at it would be that instead of a hall monitor, there's a traffic cop.

RAID 0+1, another multiple drive setup (at least 4), amounts to combinining the functionality of RAID 0 and RAID 1; typically there will be 2 groups of 2 or more drives each (the same number of drives in each group if more than 2). The drives in each group are configured relative to one another as RAID 1, the groups are configured relative to one another as RAID 0. The effect is the speed enhancement of RAID 0 coupled with the data integrity enhancement of RAID 1 - at the costs of increased heat production, energy cost, and hardware acquisition. RAID 0+1 often is found on ultra-high-buck, flat-out cutting-edge gaming, multimedia, or CAD machines, where price is far less a factor than squeezing out every possible bit of performance.

There's also something relatively new, called RAID 6 - which its originator, Intel, claims offers the best of all RAID configurations in one package, I really haven't enough familiarity with it to comment on it.

Personally - and this is just me - I favor having operating system and applications on a 2-drive RAID 0 setup using a pair of the highest speed drives practical - size is relatively unimportant since all that's gonna be on those drives is OS and apps plus whatever data you happen at the moment to be working with - while data for storage, not actively in use, goes to an independent 3rd, high-capacity drive, the speed of which is relatively unimportant. Currently, my "main machine" is set up that way, with a pair of identical 60GB drives in RAID 0 and an independent 300GB drive (of different brand, but that's not important) used strictly as storage. All 3 are 7200rpm SATA drives.

Incidentally, for backup, I recommend an external hard drive. Use whatever backup app and schedule you like, but back up externally.


(edit to add):
Here are a couple of pretty good articles to help you figure things out:

RAID: What is it and why do you care?

RAID - Your Guide

You will not be able to boot. Windows (assuming that's your OS) is trying to load the basic drivers for a computer that it is no longer on. That's why you're getting the BSOD. I'm pretty certain if you read it, it's complaining about some .dll or .sys files.... Those would be the drivers. You're gonna have to start over and reinstall windows with it in that system.

You will not be able to boot. Windows (assuming that's your OS) is trying to load the basic drivers for a computer that it is no longer on. That's why you're getting the BSOD. I'm pretty certain if you read it, it's complaining about some .dll or .sys files.... Those would be the drivers. You're gonna have to start over and reinstall windows with it in that system.